The Summing Up

THB COLLECTED EDITION OF
Tl^R WORKS OF W. SOMERSET UAUGHA14

THE SUMMING UP

By W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

LIZA OF LAMBETH

MRS. CRADDOCK

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

THE EXPLORER

THE MAGICIAN

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

THE TREMBLING OF A LEAP

ON A CHINESE SCREISN

THE PAINTED VEIL

THE CASUARINA TREE

ASIiENDEN

THE GENTLEMAN IN THE P.ARI.OUR

CAKES AND ALE

THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

THE NARROW CORNER

AH KING

ALTOGETHER {ColUcted Skort Stories)

DON FERNANDO
COSMOPOLITANS
THEATRl'

THE SUMMING UP^

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE
BOOKS AND YOU
UP AT THE VILLA
STRICTLY PERSONAL
THE RAZf^k'S EDGE
THEN AND NOfV

HERE AND TH^RE {Collection of Short Stories)

CREATURES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

CATALINA

QUARTET (Four Short Stones with Film
TRIO (Three Short Stones with Film Scripts)

A \VR1TER*S NOTEBOOK

The Collected

Plays

VOL.

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LADY FREDERIC'K

VOL.

4 :

THE CIRCLE

MRS. r>OT

THE CONSTANT WIFE

JACK STRAW

THE Bli HAD WINNER

VOL.

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PENELOPE

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THE SUMMING UP

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/.

THIS iS NOT an autobiography nor is it a book of recol-
lections, In one way and another I have used in my
writings vj^atever has happened to me in the course of
my life.^ Sometimes an experience I have had has served
as a theme and I have invented a scries of incidents to
illustrate it; more often I have taken persons with whom
I have been slightly or intimately acquainted and used
them as the foundation for characters of my invention.
Fact andTfiction are so intermingled in my work that now,
looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the
otfier. It would not interest me to record the fact^, even
if I could remember them, which I have already made
a better use. They would seem, moreover, very tame. I
have had a varied, and often an interesting, life, but not
an adventurous one. I have a poor memory. 1 can never
remember a good story till 1 hear it again and then I
forget it before 1 have had a chance to tell it to somebody
else. I have never been able to remember even my own
jokes, so that 1 have been ^preed to go* on making new
ones. This disability, I am aware, has made my company
less agreeable than it might otherwise have been.

1 have never kept a diary. I wish now that during the
year that followed my first success as a dramatist I had
done so, for I met then nvany persons of cdnsequencc and
it might have proved an interesting document. At that
period the confidence of the people in*thc aristocracy and
the landed gentry had been shattered by the muddle they
had made of things ki South Africa, but the aristocracy
and the landed gentry had not realized this and they
preserved their old self-confidence. At certain political
houses 1 frequented they still talj^cd as though to run the
Britisli Empire were their private business. It gave me a
peculiar sensation to hear it discussed, when a general
election was in the air, whetlier Tom should have the
Home Office and whether Dick would be satisfied with
Ireland. I do not suppose that anyone to-day reads.the
novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward,’ but dull though they
may be, my recollection is that some of tliem give a very
good picture of wliat the lift of the ruling class was then,

/

Novelists were still much concerned with it a/id even
writers who had never known a lord thought it nscessary
to write largely about persons of rank. It would astonish
anyone who now looked at the playbills of the day to see
how many of the chairacters were titled. * Managers
thought that they attracted the public, and actors liked
to portray them. But as the political importance of the
aristocracy dwindled the public took less interest ib it.
Playgoers began to be ready to observe the actions of
people of their own class, tne well-to-do merchants and
professional men who were then conducting the affairs of
the country: and the rule, thoqgh never formulated, pre-
vailed that the writer should not introduce ♦persons of
title unless they were essential to his theme. It was still
impossible to interest the public in the lower classes.
Novels and plays that dtalt with them were very generally
considered sordid. It will be curious to see if now that
these classes have acquired political power the public at
large will take the same interest in their lives that for so
long it took in the lives of the titled, and for a while in
those of the opulent bourgebisie.

During this period T met persons who by their rank,
fame or position might very well have thought themselves
destined fo become historical figures. I did not find them
as brilliant as^ny fancy had painted them. The linglish
arc a political* nation and I was often asked to houses
where politics wca: the ruling interest. I could not dis-
cover in the eminent statesmen I met there any marked
capacity. I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree
of intelligence was needed to rule a nation. Since then I
have known in various countries a good many politicians
who have attained high office. I have continued to be
puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their
minds. I have found them ill-informed upon the ordinary
affairs of life and I have not often discovered in them
either subtlety of intellect or liveliness of imagination.
At one time I was inclined to think that they owed theii
illustrious position only to their gift of speech, for it must
be next door to impossible to rise to power in a demo-
cratic community unless you can catch the ears of the

2

public; and the gift of speech, as we know, is not often
accompanied by the power of thought. But since I have
seen statesmen who did not seem to me very clever con-
duct public affairs with reasonable success I cannot but
think I was? wrong: it must be th^t to govern a nation you
need a specific talent and that this may very well exist
without general ability. In the same way I have known
merr of affairs who have made great fortunes and brought
vast enterprises to prosperity, but in ever 3 rthing uncon-
cerned vdth their business af)pear to be devoid even of
common sense.

• Nor was the convers^^tion that I heard then as clever
as T had expected. It seldom gave you much to think
about. It was easy, though not always gay; amiable and
superficia\ Serious topics were not dealt with, for there
was a feeling that to discuss them m general company was
embarrassing, and the fear of ‘shop’ seemed to prevent
people from speaking of the subjects in which they were
most interested. So far as 1 could judge conversation
consisted in little more than a decorous badinage; but it
was not often that you hcard^a witticism worth repeating,
Qne might have thought 4:hat the only use of culture was
to enable one to talk nonsense with distinction. On the
w-hole I think the most interesting and consistently
amusing talker I ever knew was fidmund Gosse. He had
read a great deal, though not very carefully, it appears,
and his conversation was extremely intelligent. He had a
prodigious memory, a keen sense of humour, and malice.
He had known Swinburne intimately and could talk about
him in an entrancing* fashion, but he could also talk of
Shelley, whom after all he could not possibly have known,
as if he had been a bosom-friend. For many years he had
been aitquaintcd with Eminent pAsons. 1 think he was a
vain man and he had observed their absurdities with
satisfaction. I am sure he made them much more amusing
than they really were.

1

I HAVE ALWAYS wondered at the passion many

people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige you
acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know
famous men proves only that you are yourself of small
account. The celebrated develop a technique to deal with
the person they come across. They show the world a
mask, often an impressive one, but take care tq conceal
their real selves. They play the part that is expected from
them and with practice learn to play it very well, but you
are stupid if you think that this public performance of
theirs corresponds with th* man within.

I have been attached, deeply attached, to a few people;
but I have been interested in men in general not for t^eir
own sakes, but for the sake of my work. I h^ve not, as
Kant enjoined, regarded each man as an end in himself,
but as material that might be useful to me as a writer.
I have been more con^rned with the obscure than with
the famous. They arc more often themselves. They have
had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from
the world or to impress it. Their idiosyncrasies have had
more chance to develop in the limited circle of their
activity, and since they havewnever been in the public eye
it has never occurred to them tjiat they have anything to
conceal. They display their oddities because it has never
struck them that they are odd. And after all it is with the
common fun of men tlmt we writers have to deal; kings,
dictators, coi^mercial magnates are from our point of
view very unsatisfactor)\ To w’rite about them is a
venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure
that has attended their efforts shows that such beings arc
too exceptional to form a proper ground for a work of
art. They cannot be made real. The ordinary is the
writer’s richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity,
its infinite variety affoid imending material. TI^ great
man is too often all of a piece; it is the little maii tnat is a
bundle of contradictory elements. Me is inexhaustible.
You never come to the end of the surprises lie has in
store for you. For my part I would much sooner spend
a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than
with a prime minister.

4

TN i HIS BOOK I ani going to try to sott out my thoughts
on the sublets that have chiefly Interested me during the
course of my life. But such conclusions as I have come
to have drifted about my mind like the wreckage of a
foundered ship on a restless sea. It has seemed to me that
if I set them down in some sort of order I should see for
myself mpre distinctly what they really were and so might
get some kind of coherence into them. I have long
thought I should like to make such an attempt and more
than once, when starting on a journey that was to last for
several months, have deterniined to set about it. The
opportunity seemed ideal. But I have always found that
I was assadcd by so many impressions, I saw so many
strange things and met so many people who excited my
fancy, that I had no rime to reflect. The experience of the
moment was so vivid that I could not attune my mind
to introspection.

I have been held back ako by the irksomeness of set-
tijig down my thoughts my own person. For thougli I
have written a good deal from this standpoint I have written
as a novelist and so in a manner have been able to regard
myself as a character in the stor/. Long Ivibit has made
it more comfortable for me to speak ihrougJi the creatures
of my invention. I can decide what,th^y would tliink
more readily than I can decide what I think myself. The
one has always been a pleasure to me; the other has been
a labour that I havc*wiilingly put off. But now I can
afford to put it off no longer. In youth the years stretch
before one so long that it is hard to realize that they will
ever p^ss, and even in middle %gc, with the ordinary
expectation of life in these days, it is easy to tind excuses
for delaying what one would like to do but does not want
to; but at last a time comes when death must be con-
sidered. Here and there one’s contemporaries drop off.
We know that all men arc mortal (Socrates was a man;
therefore — and so forth), but it remains for us little more
than a logical premiss till we are forced to recoa:nize that

/

in the ordinary course of things our end can no longer be
remote. An occasional glance at the obituary column of
The Times has suggested to me that the sixties are very
unhealthy; I have long thought that it would exasperate
me to die before I had witten this book and so it seemed
to me that I had better set about it at once. When I have
finished it I can face the future with serenity, for I shall
have rounded off my lifers work. I can no longer persuade
myself that I am not ready to write it, since if I have not
by now made up my mind about the tilings that seem of
importance to me there is small likelihood that I ‘shall ever
do so. I am glad at last to collect all these thoughts tjiat
for so long have floated at hapHkzard on the various levels
of my consciousness. When they are written down I shall
have finished with them and my mind will be free to
occupy itself with othor things. For I hope that this will
not be the last book I shall write. One does not die imme-
diately one has made one’s will; one makes one’s will as a
precaution. To have settled one’s affairs is a very good
preparation to leading the rest of one’s life without
concern for the future. When I have finished this book
I shall know where I stand. I c^n afford then to do what
I choose with the years that remain to mE

4

IT IS inevitable that in it I should say many
things that I have said before; that is why I have called it
The Summing Up. When a judgfe sums up a case he
recapitulates the facts that have been put before the jury
and comments on the speeches of counsel. He does not
offer new evidence. And since I have put the whpl^ of my
life into my books much of what I have to say will
naturally have found a place in them. There are few sub-
jects within the compass of my interests that I have not
lightly^ or seriously touched upon. All I can attempt to
do now is to give a coherent picture of my feelings and
opinions; and here and there, maybe, to state with greater
elaboration some idea which the limitations I have thought

6

fit to accept in fiction and in the drama have only allowed
jme to hint at.

This book must be egotistic. It is about certain sub-
jects that are important to me and it is about myself
because I can only treat of thesq subjects as they have
affected me.* But it is not about my doings. I have no
desire to lay bare my heart, and I put limits to the intimacy
that I wish the reader to enter upon with me. There are
matters on which I am content to maintain my privacy.
No one can tell the whole truth about himself. It is
not only vanity that has prevented those who have tried
to reveal themselves to the world from telling the whole
truth; it is direction of iijterest; their disappointment
•with themselves, their surprise that they can do things
that seem to them so abnormal, make them place too
great an emphasis on occurrences that are more common
than they suppose. Rousseau in the course of his Con-
fessions narrates incidents that have profoundly shocked
the sensibility of mankind. By describing them so frankly
ho falsified his values and so gave them in his book a
greater importance than they had in his life. They were
events among a multitude of others, virtuous or at least
neutral, that he omitted because they were too ordinary
to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who
pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented
by his bad ones. This is the type that most bften writes
about himself. He leaves out his redeeming Qualities and
so appears only weak, unprincipled and •vicious,

;

I WRITE this book to disembarrass my soul of certain
notions that have hovered about in it too long for my
comfort, • I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid
of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never
feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not
much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am
right, otherwise 1 should not think as I do, and they are
wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be
wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to mscover that

my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. 1
have a certain confidence in my instinct.

I must write as though I were a person of importance;
and indeed, I am — to myself. To myself I am the "most
important person in tke world; though I dp not forget
that, not even taking into consideration so grand a
conception as the Absolute, but from the standpoint of
common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It
would have made small difference to the universe if I had
never existed. Though I ,may seem to write as though*
significance must necessarily be attached to certain of my
works, I mean only that they are of moment to me for
the purpose of any discussion during which I may have
occasion to mention them. I think few serious writers;
by which I do not only mean writers of serious things,
can be entirely indifferent to the fate that will befall their
works after their death. It is pleasant to think, not that
one may achieve immortality (immortality for literary
productions lasts in any case but a few hundred years and
then is seldom more than the immortality of the school-
room) but that one may hp read with interest by a few
gjfenerations and find a place, however small, in the history
of one’s country’s literature. But so fat as I am con-
cerned, 1 look upon this modest possibility with scep-
ticism. Even in my life I have seen writers who made
much more stir in the world of letters than ever I have,
sink into oblivion. When I was young George Meredith
and Thomas Hardy seemed certain of survival. They have
ceased to mean very much to the youth of to-day. From
time to time they will doubtlesr find a critic in search
of a subject to write an article about them, which may
cause readers here and there to get out one or other
of their books from a library;*, but I think it is clear
that neither of them wrote anything that will be read
as Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy or Tom Jones
is read.

If in the following pages I seem to express myself
dogmatically, it is only because I find it very boring to
qualify every phrase with an *I think’ or ‘to my mind’.
Everything: I sav is merely an opinion of my own. The

i

reader can take it or leave it. If he has the patience to
read what follows he will sec that there is only one thing
aboul; which T am certain, and this is that there is very
little about which one can be certain.

6

WHEN I BEGAN to write I did so as though it were
the most natural thing in the world. ^ took to it as a duck
takes to w^ter. I have never ejaite got over my astonish-
ment at being a writer; there seems no reason for my
having become one except an irresistible inclinarioo, and
,I do not see .why such an inclination should have arisen
in me. For well over a hundred years my family has
practised According to the Dictionary of National
Biography my grandfather was one. of the two founders
of the Incorporated Law Society, and in the catalogue of
the Library at the Britivsh Museum there is a long list of
• hi^ legal works. He wrote only one book that was not
of this character. It was a collection of essays that he had
contributed to the solid magazines of the day and he
issued it, as became his sense of decorum, anonymously.
I once had the book in my hands, a handsome volume
bound in calf, but I never read it and I have not been able
to get hold of a copy since. I wish I had, forj might have
learnt from it something of the kind of man^he was. For
many years he lived in Chancery Lane, for he became
secretary of the Society he had founded, and when he
retired to a house in Kensington Gore overlooking the
Park, he was presented with a salver, a tea and coffee
service and an ^pergiie, in silver, so massive and ornate
that they have been ever since an embarrassment to his
descendants. An old sc4icitor, wh^m I knew when I was
a boy, told me that as an articled clerk he was once invited
to dine with my grandfather. My grandfather carved the
beef and then a servant handed him a dish of potatoes
baked in their skins. There are few things better to eat
than a potato in its skin, with plenty of butter, pepper and
salt, but apparently my grandfather did not tliink so. He
rose in his chair at the head of the table and took the

9

Tub Summibq Up. B

potatoes out of the dish one by one and threw one at each
picture on the walls. Then without a word he sat down'
again and went on with his dinner. I asked my friend
what effect this behaviour had on the rest of the comjpany.
He told me that no onertook any notice. He, also told me
that my grandfather was the ugliest little man he ever saw.

I went once to the building of the Incorporated Society in
Chancery Lane to see for myself if he was really so ugly as
aU that, for there is a portrait of him there. If what my
old gentleman said was true the painter must have grossly'
flattered my grandfather; he has given him vet^r fine dark
eyes under black eyebrows, and there is a faintly ironic
twinkle in them; a firm jaw, a straight noseband pouting
red Ups. His dark hair is windswept as becomingly as that "
of Miss Anita Loos. He is holding a quill and there is a
pile of books, doubtless his own, by his side. Notwith-
standing his black coat, he does not look so respectable
as I should have expected, but sUghtly mischievous.
Many years ago when I was destroying the papers of one ,
of his sons, my uncle, who had died, I came across the
diary that. my grandfather .kept when as a yoimg man at
the beginning of the nineteenth century* he did what I
beUeve was called the Little Tour, France, Germany ^d
Switzerland; and I remember that when he described the
not very impressive fall of the Rhine at Schaifhausen he
offered thai^s to God Almighty because in creating
‘this stupendous cataract’ he had given ‘His miserable
creatures occasion to reaUze their insignificance in com-
parison with the prodigious greatness of His works.’

7

MY PARENTS died when I was so young, my mother
when I was eight, my father when I was ten, that I know
Uttle of them but from hearsay. My father, I do not know
why unless he was drawn by some such restlessness for
the unknown as has consumed Ms son, went to Paris and
became soUcitot to the British Embassy. He had offices
just opposite, in the Faubourg St. Honord, but he Uved
in what was then called the Avenue d’Antin. a broad

to

street with chestnut trees on each side of it that leads from
‘ the Rond Point. He was a great traveller for those days.
He h^d been to Turkey, Greece and Asia Minor and in
Morocco as far as Fez, which was a place few people then
visited. Hediad a considerable library of travel books and
the apartment in the Avenue d’Antin was filled with the
things he had brought back, Tanagra statuettes, Rhodes
ware and Turkish daggers in hilts of richly decorated
, silver. He was forty when he married my mother, who
was more^than twenty years younger. She was a very
beautiful woman and he was a very ugly man. I have been
told that they were known in the Paris of that day as
Beauty and tshc Beast. Her lather was in the army; he died
in India and his widow, my grandmother, after squander-
ing a cohi: IJcrable fortune, settled down in France to live
on her pension. She was a woman f)f character, I suspect,
and perhaps of some talent, for she wrote novels in French
pour jeunes filles and composed the music for drawing-room
ballads. I like to think that the novels were read and the
ballads sung by Octave FeuiUet’s high-born heroines. I
have a little photograph of hCr, a middle-aged woman in
a crinoline with fine eyes ?nd a look of good-humoured
determination. My mother was very small, with large
brown eyes and hair of a rich reddish gold, exquisite
features and a lovely skin. She w&s very maich admired.
One of her great friends was Lady Anglesey? an American
woman who died at an advanced age not very long ago,
and she told me that she had once said to my mother:
‘You’re so beautiful and there are so many people in love
with you, why are yoti faithful to that ugly little man
you’ve married?’ And my mother answered: ‘He never
hurts my feelings.’

Th^ only letter of hers I ever sUw was one that I came
across when I was going through my uncle’s papers after
his death. He was a clergyman and she asked him to be
godfather to one of her sons. She expressed, very simply
and piously, the hope that by reason of his holy calling
the relationship into which she invited him to enter would
have such an influence on the new-born child that he
would grow up to be a good, God-fearing man. She was

II

a great novel-reader and in the billiard-room of the
apartment in the Avenue d'Antin were two great book-
cases filled with Tauchnitz. She suffered from tuber-
culosis of the lungs and I remember the string of donkeys
that stopped at the door to provide her with* asses* milk,
which at that time was thought to be good* for that
malady. In the summer we used to take a house at
Deauville, not then a fashionable spot, but a little fishing
village overshadowed by the smarter Trouville, and
towards the end of her life we spent winters at Pau. Once
when she was lying in bed, I suppose after a haemorrhage,
and knew she could not live^much longer, the thought
came to her that her sons when they grew up would not
know what she was like when she died, so she called her
maid, had herself dressed in an evening gown of white
satin and went to thef photographer’s. She had six sons
and died in childbirth. The doctors of the period had a
theory that to have a cliild was beneficial to women
suffering from consumption. She was thirty-eight.

After my mother’s death, her maid became my nurse.
I had till then had French fiurses and I ^d been sent to
a French school for children. «iMy knowledge of English
must have been slight. I have been told that on one
occasion, seeing a horse out of the window of a railway
carriage, I ciied: 'Regarde^y Mamariy voila m *orse.*

I think ftiy father had a romantic mind. He took it
into his head to build a house to live in during tlie summer.
He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Sursenes.
The view was splendid over the plain, and in the distance
was Paris, There was a road down to the river and by the
river lay a little village. It was to be like a villa on the
Bosphorus and on the top floor it was surrounded by
loggias. I used to go*down with him every Sunday by
the Seine on a batcau-mouche to sec how it was getting on.
When the roof was on, my father began to futnish it by
buying a pair of antique fire-irons. He ordered a great
quantity of glass on which he had engraved a sign against
the Evil Eye which he had found in Morocco and which
the reader may see on the cover of this book. It was a
white house and the shutters were painted red. The

garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then
my father died.

8

I HAD BEEN taken away from the French school and
went for my lessons every day to the apartment of the
English clergyman at the Church attached to the Embassy.
His method of teaching me English was to make me read
aloud the j>olice-court news in The Standard and I can
still remember the horror with which I read the ghastly
details of a murder in the train between Paris and Calais.
I must thenp have been nine. I was for long uncertain
about the pronunciation of English words and I have
never foigottcn the roar of laughter that abashed me
when in my preparatory school i read out the phrase
‘unstable as water* as though unstable rhymed with
Dunstable.

I have never had more than two English lessons in
my life, for though I wrote essays at school, I do not
remember that I ever received any instruction on how to
put sentences together. The two lessons I have had were
given me so late in life that I am afraid I cannot hope
greatly to profit by them. The first was only a few years
ago. I was spending some weeSs in London and had
engaged as temporary secretary a young •woman. She
was shy, rather pretty, and absorbed in a love affair with
a married man. I had written a book called Cakes and Ale
and, the typescript arriving one Saturday morning, I
asked her if she woulcf be good enough to take it home
and correct it over the week-end. I meant her only to
make a note of mistakes in spelling that the t3^ist might
have m^de and point out errors occasioned by a hand-
writing that is not always easy to decipher. But she was
a conscientious young person and she took me more
literally than I intended. When she brought back the
typescript on Monday morning it was accompanied by
four foolscap sheets of corrections. I must confess that
at the first glance I was a trifle vexed; but then I thought
that it would be silly of me not to profit, if I could, by the

trouble she had taken and so sat me down to examine
them. I suppose the young woman had taken a course at '
a secretarial college and she had gone through my noirel in
the same methodical way as her masters had gone through
her essays. The remarks that filled the four neat pages of
foolscap were incisive and severe. I could not but sur-
mise that the professor of English at the secretarial college
did not mince matters. He took a marked line, there
could be no doubt about that; and he did not allow that
there might be two opinions about anything. His apt
pupil would have nothing to do with a preposition at the
end of a sentence. A mark o^ exclamation betokened her
disapproval of a colloquial phrase. She had a feeUng that
you must not use the same word twice on a page and she
was ready every time with a synonym to put in its place.
If I had indulged myself in the luxury of a sentence of
ten lines, she wrote: "Qarify this. Better break it up
into two or more periods.* When I had availed myself
of the pleasant pause that is indicated by a semi-coloo,
she noted: ‘A fiill stop*; and if I had ventured upon
a ^colon she remarked stiAgingly: ‘Obsplete.* But the
harshest stroke of all was her comment on what I thought
was rather a good joke: ‘Are you sure of your facts?*
Taking it all in all I am bound to conclude that the
professor at her college would not have given me very
high marks. *•

The second lesson I had was given me by a don, both
intelligent and charming, who happened to be staying
with me when I was myself correcting the typescript of
another book. He was good enough to offer to read it.
I hesitated, because I knew that he judged from a stand-
point of excellence that is hard to attain; and though I was
aware that he had a profound knowledge of Elizabethan
literature, his inordinate admiration for Esther Waters
made me doubtful of his discernment in the productions
of our own day: no one could attach so great a value to
that work who had an intimate knowledge of the French
novel during the nineteenth century. But I was anxious
to make my book as good as I could and I hoped to
benefit by his criticisms. They were in point of fact

lenient. They interested me peculiarly because I inferred
that this was the way in which he dealt with the composi-
tion» of undergraduates. My don had, I think , a natural
gift for language, which it has been his business to culti-
vate; his ta^e appeared to me fruitless. I was much struck
by his insistence on the force of individual words. He
liked the stronger word rather than the euphonious. To
give an example, I had written that a statue would be
placed in a certain square and he suggested that 1 should
write: the.statue will stand. 1 had not done that because
my eat was offended by the alliteration. 1 noticed also
that he had a feeling that \^rds should be used not only
to balance 4 sentence but to balance an idea. This is
sound, for an idea may lose its effect if it is delivered
abruptly; out it is a matter of delicacy, since it may well
lead to verbiage. Here a knowleflge of stage dialogue
should help. An actor will sometimes say to an author:
‘Couldn’t you give me a word or two more in this
speech? It seems to take away all the point of my line
if I have nothing else to say.’ As I listened to my don’s
remarks I could not but thmk how much better I shoqld
wyite now if in my youth I had had the advantage of such
sensible, broad-minded and kindly advice.

9

AS IT IS, I have had to teach myself. I have looked at
the stories I wrote when I was very young in order to dis-
cover what natural apytude I had, my original stock-in-
trade, before I developed it by taking thought. The
manner had a superciliousness that perhaps my years
excused and an irascibility that was a defect of nature;
but I am speaking ndw only of the way in which I
expressed myself. It seems to me that I had a natural
lucidity and a knack for writing easy dialogue.

AJ^en Henry Arthur Jones, then a well-known play-
wright, read my first novel, he told a friend that in due
course I should be one of the most successful dramatists
of the day. I suppose he saw in it directness and an
effective way of presenting a scene that suggested a sense

of the theatre. My language was commonplace, my
vocabulary limited, my grammar shaky and my phrases *
hackneyed. But to write was an instince that seem/^d as
natural to me as to breathe, and I did not stop to consider
if I wrote well or badly. It was not till som£ years later
that it dawned upon me that it was a delicate art that must
be painfully acquired. The discovery was forced upon me
by the difficulty I found in getting my meaning down on
paper. I wrote dialogue fluently, but when it came to a
page of description I found myself entangled \n all sorts
of quandaries. I would struggle for a couple of hours
over two or three sentences that I could in no way manage
to straighten out. I made up my mind to teach myself
how to write. Unfortunately I had no one to help me.

I made many mistakes. If I had had someone to guide
me like the charming- don of whom I spoke just now I
might have been saved much time. Such a one might
have told me that such gifts as I had lay in one direction
and that they must be cultivated in that direction; it was
useless to try to do something for which I had no aptitude.
But at that time a florid prose was admired. Richness of
texture was sought by means of a jewelled phrase and
sentences stiff with exotic epithets: the ideal was a brocade
so heavy with gold that it stood up by itself. The
intelligent ywng read Walter Pater with enthusiasm. My
common sense suggested to me that it was anaemic stuff;
behind those elaborate, gracious periods I was conscious
of a tired, wan personality. I was young, lusty and
energetic; I wanted fresh air, action, violence, and I found
it hard to breathe that dead, heavily-scented atmosphere
and sit in those hushed rooms in which it was indecorous
to speak above a wliispcr. But I would not listen to my
common sense. I persuaded myself that thfe jvas the
height of culture and turned a scornful shoulller to the
outside world where men shouted and swore, played the
fool, wenched and got drunk. I read Intentioris and The
Picture of Dorian Gray. I was intoxicated by the colour
and rareness of the fantastic words that thickly stud the
pages of Salome. Shocked by the poverty of my own
vocabulary, I went to the British Museum with pencil and

i6

paper and noted down the names of curious jewels, the
Byzantine hues of old enamels, the sensual feel of tex-
tiles,,, and made! elaborate sentences to bring them in.
Fortunately I could never find an opportunity to use them
and they liechere yet in an old note-book ready for anyone
who has. a mind to write nonsense. It was generally
thought then that the Authorized Version of the Bible
was the greatest piece of prose that the English language
has produced. I read it diligently, especially the Song of
Solomon, Jotting down for future use turns of phrase
that struck me and making lists of unusual or beautiful
wotds. I studied Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. In order
to assimilatoihis style I copied out passages and then tried
to write them down from memory.

The nrst fiuit of this labour was a little book about
Andalusia called The Land of the blessed Virgin. I had
occasion to read parts of it the other day. I know
Andalusia a great deal better than I knew it then, and
I, have changed my mind about a good many things of
which I wrote. Since it has continued in America to have
a small sale it occurred to me that it might be worth while
to revise it. I soon saw that this was impossible. The
book was written by someone I have completely for-
gotten. It bored me to distraction. But what 1 am con-
cerned with is the prose, for it w^ as an exjprcise in style
that 1 wrote it. It is wistful, allusive and elaborate. It has
neither case nor spontaneity. It smells of hot-house plants
and Sunday dinner like the air in the greenhouse that leads
out of the dining-room of a big house in Bayswater. There
arc a great many melodious adjectives. The vocabulary is
sentimental. It docs not remind one of an Italian brocade,
with its rich pattern q£ gold, but of a curtain material
designed by Burnc-Joncs and reproduced by Morris.

10

I DO NOT know whether it was a subconscious feeling
that this sort of writing was contrary to my bent or a
naturally methodical cast of mind that led me then to turn
my attention to the writers of the Augustan Period. The

prose of Swift enchanted me. I made up my mind that
this was the perfect way to write and I stated to wotlc on
him in the same way as I had done with* Jeremy Taylor.
I chose The Tale of a Tub. It is said that when the Dean
re-read it in his old age he cried: ‘What genius I had
then!* To my mind his genius was better shown in other
works. It is a tiresome allegory and the irony is facile.
But the style is admirable. I cannot imagine that English
can be better written. Here are no flowery periods,
fantastic turns of phrase or high-flown images. It is a
civilized prose, natural, discreet and pointed. There is
no attempt to surprise by an^extravagant vocabulary^ It
looks as though Swift made do with the first word that
came to hand, but since he had an acute and logical brain
it was always the right one, and he put it in the right
place. The strength afid balance of his sentences are due
to an exquisite taste. As I had done before I copied
passages and then tried to write them out again from
memory. I tried altering words or the order in which
they were set. I found that the only possible words were
thpse Swift had used and tl&t the order in which he had
placed them was the only possible order. It is §n
impeccable prose.

But perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be
dull. Swift’s prose is ifice a French canal, bordered with
poplars, that*runs through a gracious and undulating
country. Its tranquil charm fills you with satisfaction,
but it neither excites the emotions nor stimulates the
imagination. You go on and on and presently you are a
trifle bored. So, much as you may admire Swift’s
wonderful lucidity, his terseness, his naturalness, his lack
of aflectation, you find your attention wandering after a
while unless his matter pecuUarljf interests you. tl think
if I had my time over again I would give to the prose of
Dryden the close study I gave to that of Swift. I did not
come across it till I had lost the inclination to take so
much pains. The prose of Dryden is delicious. It has
not the perfection of Swift nor the easy elegance of
Addison, but it has a springtime gaiety, a conversational
ease, a blithe spontaneousness that are enchanting.

it

Dryden was a very good poet, but it is not the general
opinion that heihad a lyrical quality; it is strange that it
is just this that lings in his softly sparkling prose. Prose
had never been written in England like that before; it has
seldom beeti written like that since. Dryden flourished
at a happy moment. He had in his bones the sonorous
periods and the baroque massiveness of Jacobean lan-
guage and under the influence of the nimble and well-bred
felicity that he learnt from the French he turned it into an
instrument that was fit not only for solemn themes but
also to express the light thought of the passing moment,
lie .was the first of the roqpco artists. If Swift reminds
you of a French canal, Dryden recalls an English rivet
winding its cheerful way round hills, through quietly
busy towns and by nestling villages, pausing now in a
noble reach and then running powerfully through a
woodland country. It is alive, varied, windswept; and
it has the pleasant open-air smell of England.

. The work I did was certainly very good for me. I
began to write better; I did not write well. I wrote stiffly
and sclf-consciously. I tried to get a pattern into tpy
sentences, but did not see that the pattern was evident.
I took care how I placed my words, but did not reflect
that an order that was natural at the beginning of the
eighteenth century was most unnatural at the beginning
of ours. My attempt to write in the manner 6f Swift made
it impossible for me to achieve the effect of inevitable
rightness that was just what I so much admired in him.
I then wrote a number of plays and ceased to occupy
myself with anything But dialogue. It was not till five
years had passed that I set out again to write a novel. By
then I no longer had apy ambition to be a stylist; I put
aside all thought of find writing, I wanted to write with-
out any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a
manner as I could. I had so much to say that I could
afford to waste no words. I wanted merely to set down
the facts. I began with the impossible aim of using no
adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find the
exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with.
As I saw it in my mind's eye my book would have the

appearance of an immensely long telegram in which for
economy's sake you had left out every v^rd that was not"
necessary to make the sense clear. I have not read it# since
I corrected the proofs and do not know how near I came
to doing what 1 tried. My impression is that* it is written
at least more naturally than anything I had written before;
but I am sure that it is often slipshod and I daresay there
are in it a good many mistakes in grammar.

Since then I have written many other books; and
though ceasing my methodical study of the qld masters
(for though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak), I have
continued with increasing assiduity to try to write better.
I discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that
the only sensible tiling was to aim at what excellence I
could uithin them. I knew that 1 had no lyrical quality.
I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make
to enlarge it much availed me. 1 had little gift of meta-
phor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to
me. Poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were
beyond my powers. I could admire them in others as I
could admire their far-fetchtd tropes anckthe unusual but
suggestive language in which they clothed their thoughts
but my 'Own invention never presented me with such
embellishments; and I was tired of trying to do what did
not come easily to me.* On the other hand, I had an acute
power of observation and it seemed to me that 1 could see
a great many things that other people missed. I could
put down in clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense,
and if no great feeling for the richness and strangeness of
words, at all events a lively appreciation of their sound.
I knew that 1 should never write as well as I could wish,
but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well
as my natural defects allowed. • On taking thought it
seemed to me that I must aim at) lucidity, siix^licity and
euphony, I have put these three qualities in the order
of the importance I assigned to them.

IJ

who claim from the reader an effort to understand their
meaning. You Iteve only to go to the great philosophers
to secf that it is pbssiblc to express with lucidity the most
subtle reflections. You may find it difficult to understand
the thought*of Hume, and if you have no philosophical
training its implications will doubtless escape you;
but no one with any education at all can fail to under-
stand exactly what the meaning of each sentence is.
Few people have written English with more grace than
Berkeley. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find
in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to wil-
fulness. People often write^pbscurely because they have
never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort
of obscurl^v you find too often in modern philosophers, in
men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is
indeed strange. You would have thought that men who
passed their lives in the study of the great masters of
literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of
language to write if not beautifully at least with perspi-
cuity. Yet you will find in their works sentence after
sentence that you must read tVicc to discover the sense.
Offen you can only guess at it, for the writers have
evidently not said what they intended.

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself
not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression
of what he wants to say, but has not, citherlfrom lack of
mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in
his mind and it is natural enough that he should not find
a precise c'xprcssion for a confused idea. This is due
largely to the fact that many writers think, not before,
but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The
disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against
which the author must^e always on his guard, is that
there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea
acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and then
stands in the way of its own clarification. But this sort of
obscurity merges very easily into the wilful. Some
writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose
that their thoughts have a significance greater than at
first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they

21

are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all
who tun may read, and very naturally k does not 'occur'
to such writers that the fault is with their own minds
which have not the feculty of precise reflection. Here
again the magic of the written word obtains. It is
very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one
does not quite understand may mean a great deal mote
than one realizes. From this there is only a little way to
go to fall into the habit of setting down one’s impressions
in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found
to discover a hidden sense in them. There is another
form of wilful obscurity thaj^ masquerades as aristoatatic
exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery
so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul
is a secret garden into which tlxe elect may penetrate only
after overcoming a fiumbcr of perilous obstacles. But
this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is short-
sighted. For time plays it an odd trick. If the sense is
meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no
one thinks of reading. This is the fate that has befallen the
lucubrations of those Frcnth writers who were seduced
by the example of Guillaume Apollinaire. But occasion-
ally it throws a sharp cold light on what had seemed pro-
found and thus discloses the fact that these contortions of
language disguised very commonplace notions. There are
few of MallSrmd’s poems now that arc not clear; one
cannot fail to notice that his thought singularly lacked
originality. Some of his phrases were beautiful; the
materials of his verse were the poetic platitudes of his
day.

12

SIMPLICITY IS not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I
have aimed at it because I have no gift fot richness.
Within limits I admire richness in others, though I find it
difficult to digest in quantity. I can read one page of
Ruskin with delight, but twenty only with weariness.
The rolling period, the stately epithet, the noun rich in
poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give the

sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that
of wave followii» wave in the open sea; there is no doubt
that ig all this tilibre is something inspiring. Words thus
strung together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is
sensuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the
sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not
bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical
things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not
pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all.
Your mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a
subject that will suit it. It is surely out of place to write in
the grand style of inconsiderable things. No one wrote in
this manner .with greater success than Sir Thomas
Browne, but even he did not always escape this pitfall. In
the last chapter of Hydriotaphia the matter, wluch is the
destiny of man, wonderfully fits the baroque splendour of
the language, and here the Norwich doctor produced a
piece of prose that has never been surpassed in our
litgcaturc; but when he describes the finding of his urns in
the same splendid manner the effect (at least to my taste) is
less happy. When a modern wfitcr is grandiloquent to teU
you whether or no a little trollop shall hop into bed
with a commonplace young man you are right to be
disgusted.

But if richness needs gifts witH which everyone is not
endowed, simplicity by no means comes by^nature. To
achieve it needs rigid discipline. So far as I know ours
is the only language in which it has been found necessary
to give a name to the piece of prose which is described
as the purple patch; it Vould not have been necessary
to do so unless it were characteristic. English prose is
elaborate rather than simple. It was not always so.
Nothing^could be morc^racy, straightforward and alive
than the prose of Shakespeare; but it must be remembered
that this was dialogue written to be spoken. We do not
know how he would have written if like Corneille he had
composed prefaces to his plays. It may be that they would
have been as cuphuistic as the letters of Queen Elizabeth.
But earlier prose, the prose of Sir Thomas More, for
instance, is neither ponderous, flowery nor oratorical. It

smacks of the English soil. To my mind King James’s
Bible has been a very harmful influence English’ prose.
I am not so stupid as to deny its gr^t beauty. i It is
majcstical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien
imagery has nothing to do with us. Those hyperboles,
those luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I
cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that
the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life
of our country is that this work for so long a period
became the daily, and witn many the only, residing of our
people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that
grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national
sensibility. The plain, honest English spcrch was over-
whelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted
their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was
evidently something-in the English temper to which this
was congenial, perhaps a native lack of precision in
thought, perhaps a naive delight in fine words for their
own sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery,
I do not know; but the fact remains that ever since,
English prose has had tO'*strugglc against the tendency
to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the
language has reasserted itself, as it did with Drydcn and
the writers of Queen Anne, it was only to be submerged
once more t by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr.
Johnson. V/hen English prose recovered simplicity with
Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles Lamb at his
best, it lost it again with de Quinccy, Carlyle, Meredith
and Walter Pater. It is obvious that the grand style is
more striking than the plain. Indeed many people think
that a style that docs not attract notice is not style. They
will admire Walter Pater’s, but will read an essay by
Matthew Arnold without giving a moment’s litt^ntion to
the elegance, distinction and sobriety with which he set
down what he had to say.

The dictum that the style is the man is well known.
It is one of those aphorisms that say too much to mean a
great deal. W'hcrc is the man in Goethe, in his bird-like
lyrics or in his clumsy prose? AndHazlitt? But I suppose
that if a man has a confused mind he will write in a con-

fused way, if his temper is capricious his prose will be
fantastical, and iihe has a quick, darting intelligence that
is renunded by tke matter in hand of a hundred things he
will, unless he has great self-control, load his pages with
metaphor and simile. There is a great difference between
the magniloquence of the Jacobean writers, who were
intoxicated with the new wealth that had lately been
brought into the language, and the turgidity of Gibbon
and Dr. Johnson, who were the victims of bad theories.
I can rcad^ every word that Dr. Johnson wrote with
delight, for he had good sense, charm and wit. No one
could have written better if ^ had not wilfully set himself
to write in the grand style. He knew good English when
he saw n. No critic has praised Dryden*s prose more
aptly. He said of him that he appeared to have no art
other than that of expressing with clearness what he
thought with vigour. And one of his Lives he finished
with the words: ‘Whoever wishes to attain an English
style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not osten-
tatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of
Addison.’ But when he himseif sat down to write it was
with a very different aim. He mistook the orotund for
the •dignified. lie had not the good breeding to see that
simplicity and naturalness are the truest mark of dis-
tinction.

For to write good prose is an affair of good manners.
It is, unlike verse, a civil art. Poetry is baroque. Baroque
is tragic, massive and mystical. It is elemental. It de-
mands depth and insight. I cannot but feel that the prose
writers of the baroque petiod, the authors of King James’s
Bible, Sir Thomas Browne, Glanville, were poets who
had lost their way. Prose is a rococo art. It needs taste
rather tl^^n power, decorum rather than inspiration and
vigour rather than grandeur. Form for the poet is the bit
and the bridle without which (unless you are an acrobat)
you cannot ride your horse; but for the writer of prose it is
the chassis without which your car docs not exist. It is not
an accident that the best prose was written when rococo,
with its elegance and moderation, at its birth attained its
greatest excellence. For rococo was evolved when

Tn Sumaiia Uf. c

batoque had become declamatory and the world, tired
of the stupendous, asked for restraint, ^t was the natural
e3q>ression of persons who valued •a civilized life.
Humour, tolerance and horse-sense made the great
tragic issues that had preoccupied the firSt half of the
seventeenth century seem excessive. The world was a
more comfortable place to live in and perhaps for the
first time in centuries the cultivated classes could sit back
and enjoy their leisure. It has been said that good prose
should resemble the cofiversation of a well-bred man.
G>nversation is only possible when men’s minds are
free from pressing anxieties. Their lives must be
reasonably secure and they must have no grave concern
about their souls. They must attach importance to the
refinements of civilisation. They must value courtesy,
they must pay attention to their persons (and have we not
also been told that good prose should be like the clothes
of a well-dressed man, appropriate but imobtrusive?),
they must fear to bore, they must be neither flippant nor
solemn, but always apt; and they must look upon
‘enthusiasm’ with a critical glance. This is a soil very
suitable for prose. It is not to be wondered at that it ^ave
a fitting opportunity for the appearance of the best writer
of prose that our modern world has seen, Voltaire. The
writers of &iglish, perhaps owing to the poetic nature of
the langua^, have seldom reached the excellence that
seems to have come so naturally to him. It is in so far as
they have approached the ease, sobriety and precision of
the great French masters that they ate admirable.

WHETHER. YOU ascribe impoltance to euphpny, thelast
of the three characteristics that I mentioned, n}ust depend
on the sensitiveness of your ear. A great m^ny readers,
and many admirable writers, are devoid of diis quality.
Poets as we know have always made a great use of
alliteration. They are persuaded that the repetition of
a sound gives an eflcct of beauty. I do not think it
does so in prose. It seems to me that in prose allitera-

don should be used only for a special reason; udien
usedhy accidedl’ it falls on the ear very disagreeably. But
its a^dental u^ is so common that one can only suppose
that the sound of it is not universally offensive. Many
writers wi&out distress will put two rhyming words
together, join a monstrous long adjecdve to a monstrous
long noun, or between the end of one word and the
beginning of another have a conjunction of consonants
that almost breaks your jaw. These are trivial and
obvious instances. I mention them only to prove that if
careful writers can do such things it is only because they
have no ear. Words have weight, sound and appearance;
it is only by considering these that you can write a
sentena that is good to look at and good to listen
to.

I have read many books on Ehglish prose, but have
found it hard to profit by them; for the most part they
are vague, unduly theoretical, and often scolding. But
}OU cannot say this of Fowler’s Dictionary of English
Usage. It is a valuable work. I do not think anyone
writes so w ell that he cannot learn much from it. It is
liyely reading. Fowler liked simplicity, straightforward-
ness and common sense. lie had no patience with pre-
tentiousness. He had a sound feeling that idiom was the
backbone of a language and he was all for the racy phrase.
He was no slavish admirer of logic and was ^frilling enough
to give usage tight of way through the exact demesnes of
grammar. English grammar is very diffictilt and few
writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So heedful a
writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so
imgrammatically that a schoolmaster, finding such errors
in a schoolboy’s essay, would be justly indignant. It is
necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write
grammatically than not, but it is well to ranember that
grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the
only test. I would prefer a phrase that was easy and un-
ailected to a phrase that was grammatical. One of the
differences between French and English is that in French
you can be grammatical with complete naturalness, but in
English not invariably. It is a difficulty in writing English

that the sound of the living voice dominates the look
of the printed word. I have given the niatter of style a
great deal of thought and have taken great pains. I have
written few pages that I feel I could not improve and far
too many that I have left with dissatisfaction Because, try
as I would, I coiild do no better. I cannot say of myself
what Johnson said of Pope: *He never passed a fault
unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair.*
I do not write as I want to; I write as I can.

But Fowler had no ear. He did not see that, simplicity
may sometimes make concessions to euphony. I do not
think a far-fetched, an archaic/>r even an affected word is
out of place when it sounds better than the blunt, obvious
one or when it gives a sentence a better balance. But, I
hasten to add, though I think you may without misgiving
make this concession^ to pleasant sound, I think you
should make none to what may obscure your meaning.
Anything is better than not to write clearly. There is
nothing to be said against lucidity, and against sim^
plicity only the possibility of dryness. This is a risk
that is well worth taking ^yhen you reflect how much
better it is to be bald than to wear a curly wig. But
there is in euphony a danger that must be considered. It
is very likely to be monotonous. When George Moore
began to write, his style was poor; it gave you the im-
pression that %ie wrote on wrapping paper with a blunt
pencil. But he developed gradually a very musical
English. He learnt to write sentences that fall away on
the ear with a misty languor and it delighted him so much
that he could never have enough of it. He did not escape
monotony. It is like the sound of water lapping a shingly
beach, so soothing that you presently cease to be sensible
of it. It is so mellifluous that you hanker for some harsh-
ness, for an abrupt dissonance, that will interrupt the
silky concord. I do not know how one can guaijd against
this. I suppose the best chance is to have a more lively
faculty of boredom than one*s readers so that one is
wearied before they are. One must always be on the
watch for mannerisms and when certain cadences come
too easily to the pen ask oneself whether they have not

28

become mechanical. It is very hard to discover the exact
point where thd| idiom one has formed to express oneself
has lost its taag. As Dr. Johnson said: 'He that has
once studiously formed a style, rarely writes afterwards
with complete ease*. Admirably as I think Matthew
Arnold’s style was suited to his particular purposes, I
must admit that his mannerisms are often irritating. His
style was an instrument that he had forged once for all;
it was not like the human hand capable of performing a
variety of^ actions.

If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and
yet^with liveliness you would write perfectly: you would
write like Voltaire. And yet we know how fetal the
pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in the tiresome
acrobatics of Meredith. Macaulay and Carlyle were in
their Jiherent ways arresting; but?>at the heavy cost of
naturalness. Their flashy effects distract the mind.
They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe
a,man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried
a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other
step. A good style should sh#w no sign of effort. What is
written should seem a happy accident. I think no one in
Ffance now writes more admirably than Colette, and
such is the ease of her expression that you cannot bring
yourself to believe that she take? any trouble over it. I
am told that there are pianists who have at natural tech-
nique so that they can play in a manner that most
executants can achieve only as the result of unremitting
toil, and I am williijg to believe that there are writers
who are equally fortuhate. Among them I was much
inclined to place Colette. I asked her. I was exceedingly
surprised to hear that she wrote everything over and over
again, ^he told me tha/t she would often spend a whole
morning working upon a single page. But it does not
matter how one gets the effect of ease. For my part, if I
get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom
provides me with the word, the turn of phrase, that is
appropriate without being far-fetched or commonplace.

29

I HAVE read that Anatole France tried to use only the
constructions and the vocabulary of the writers of the
seventeenth centtuy whom he so greatly admired. 1 do
not know if it is true. If so, it may explain why there is
some lack of vitality in his beautiful and simple French.
•But simplicity is false when you do not say a thing
that you should say bec^iuse you cannot say it in a
certain way. One should write in the manner of one’s
period. The language is alive and constantly changing; to
try to write like the authors of a distant past can only give
rise to artificiality. I should not hesitate to use the
common phrases of the day, knowing that their vogue
was ephemeral, or sla&ig, though aware that in ten years
it might be incomprehensible, if they gave vividness and
actuality. If the style has a classical form it can support
the discreet use of a phraseology that has only a locd and
temporary aptness. I would sooner a writer were vulgar
thsm mincing; for life is vulgar, and it is life he seeks.

I think that we English authors ha\;£; much to learn
from our fellow authors in America. For Americ&n
writing has escaped the tyranny of King James’s Bible
and Aniericaa writers have been less affected by the old
masters whose mode of writing is part of our culture.
They have formed their style, unconsciously perhaps,
more directly from the living speech that surrounds them;
and at its best it has a directness, a vitality and a drive that
give our more urbane manner an air of languor. It has
been an advantage to American writers, many of whom at
one time or anotlier have been reporters, that their
journalism has been written in a more trenchant, ijicrvous,
gtapluc English than ours. For we read the newspaper
now as our ancestors read the Bible. Not without profit
either; for the newspaper, especially when it is of the
popular sort, offers us a part of experience that we writers
cannot afford to miss. It is raw material straight from the
knacker’s yard, and we are stupid if we turn up our noses
because it smells of blood and sweat. We cannot, how-

30

ever willingly we would, escape the influence rf this work-
aday prose. But^e journalism of a period has very much
the s^e style; it might all have been written by the
same hand; it Is impersonal. It is well to counteract
its effect by reading of another kind. One can do this only
by keeping constantly in touch with the writing of an age
not too remote from one’s own. So can one have a
standard by which to test one’s own style and an ideal
which in one’s modern way one can aim at. For my part
the two writers I have found most useful to study for this
purpose are Hazlitt and Cardinal Newman. I would try
to imitate neither, flazlitt can be unduly rhetorical; and
somttimcs his decoration is^s fussy as Victorian Gothic.
Newman can*be a trifle flowery. But at their best both ate
admirable. Time has litde touched their style; it is almost
contempt rary. Hazlitt is vivid, bracing and energetic; he
has strength and liveliness. You feel the man m his
phrases, not the mean, querulous, disagreeable man that
he appeared to the world that knew him, but the man
within of his own itleal vision. (And the man within us
is as true in reality as the mat^ pitiful and halting, of our
outward seeming.) Newman had an exquisite grace,
music, playful sometimes and sometimes grave, a wood-
land beauty of phrase, dignity and mellowness. Both
wrote with extreme lucidity. Neither is quite as simple
as the purest taste demands. Here I think Matthew
Arnold excels them. Bodi had a wonderful balance of
phrase and both knew how to write sentences pleasing to
the eye. Both had an ear of extreme sensitiveness.

If anyone could combine their merits in the manner
of writing of the present day he would write as well as it
is possible for anyone to write.

U

FROM time to time I have asked myself whether I
should have been a better writer if I had devoted my
whole life to literature. Somewhat early, but at what age I
cannot remember, I made up my mind that, having but
one Ufe, I should like to get the most I could out of it. It

did not seem t6 me enough merely to write. I wanted to
make a pattern of my life, in which wri^ng would.be an
essent^ element, but which would include all the ^ther
activities proper to man, and which death would m the
end round off in complete fuliilment. I had many dis-
abilities. 1 was small; I had endurance but little physical
strength; I stammered; I was shy; 1 had poor health. 1 had
no facility for games, which play so great a part in the
normal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of
these reasons or from nati’te I do not know, an instinctive
shrinking from my fellow men that has mad£ it difficult
for me to enter into any familiarity with them. I have
loved individuals; I have nevtr much cared for men ifi the
mass. I have none of that engaging come-hitherness that
makes people take to one another on first acquaintance.
Though in the course of years I have learnt to assume
an air of heartiness when forced into contact with a
stranger, I have never liked anyone at first sight. I do not
think I have ever addressed someone I did not know in
a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on
board shap unless he first spoke to me. The weakness of
my flesh has prevented me from enjoying that com-
munion with the human race that is* engendered •by
alcohol; long before I could reach the state of intoxication
that enstbles so many,cmore happily constituted, to look
upon all mep as their brothers, my stomach has turned
upon me and I have been as sick as a dog. These are
grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I
have had to make the best of them. I have followed the
pattern I made with persistence. I do not claim that it was
a perfect one. I think it was the best that I could hope
for in the circumstances and with the very limited powers
that were granted to me by natui;e.

Looking for the special function of man Aristotle
decided that since he shares growth with the plants and
perception with the beasts, and alone has a rational ele-
ment, his function is the activity of the soul. From this
he concluded, not as you would have thought sensible
that man should cultivate the three forms of activity
which he ascribed to him, but that he should pursue only

3 ^

that which is especial to him. Philosophers and moralists
have* looked a« the body with misgiving. They have
pohWed out that its satisfactions are brief. But a pleasure
is none the less a pleasure because it does not please for
ever. It is delightful to plunge into cold water on a hot
day even though in a moment your skin is no longer sensi-
tive to the coldness. White is no whiter if it lasts for a year
or a day. I looked upon it then as part of the pattern I
was attempting to draw to experience all the pleasures of
sense. I have not been afraid or excess: excess on occasion
is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring
the, deadening effect of a habit. It tonifies the system and
rests the nerves. The spirit is often most free when the
body is satiated with pleasure; indeed, sometimes the
stars shine more brightly seen from the gutter than from
the hilltop. The keenest pleasure to which the body is
susceptible is that of sexual congress. I have known men
who gave up their whole lives to this; they are grown old
now, but I have noticed, not without surprise, that they
look upon them as well spent. It has been my misfortune
that a native fastidiousness has prevented me from
indulging as much in this particular delight as I might
have. I have exercised moderation because I was hard to
please. When from time to time I have seen the persons
with whom the great lovers satisfied their desires I have
been more often astonished by the robustness of their
appetites than envious of their successes. It is obvious
that you need not often go hungry if you are willing to
dine off mutton hash and turnip tops.

Most people live haphazard lives subject to the
varying winds of fortune. Many are forced by the
situation in which they were born and the necessity of
earning^ a living to keep to a straight and narrow road
in which there is no possibility of turning to the right
or to the left. Upon these the pattern is imposed. life
itself has forced it on them. There is no reason why such
a pattern should not be as complete as that which anyone
has tried self-consciously to make. Bat the artist is in a
privileged position. I use the word artist, not meaning
to attach any measure of value to what he produces,

SI

but merely to signify someone who is occupied with
the arts. I wish 1 couid find a better protd. Creator
is pretentious and seems to make a claiq^ to origiiydity
that can scidom be justihed. Craftsman is not enough.
A carpenter is a craftsman, and though he may be in the
narrower sense an artist, he has not as a rule the freedom
of action which the most incompetent scribbler, the

E oorest dauber, possesses. The artist can within certain
mits make what he likes of his life. In other callings,
in medicine for instance or the law, you arc free to
choose whether you will adopt them or not. But having
chosen, you are free no longer. You are bound by the
rules of your profession; a Standard of conduct is im-
posed upon you. The pattern is predetermined. It is only
the artist, and maybe the crimind, who can make his own.

Perhaps it was a natural sense of tidiness that engaged
me, when stiU so young, to design a pattern for my hfe;
perhaps it was due to something I discovered in myself
about which I shall have a little to say later. The defect
of such an undertaking is that it may kill spontaneity.
One great difference bctwctvi the persons of real life and
the persons of fiction is that the persons of real life are
creatures of impulse. It has been said that metaphysics
is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon
instinct; and ^t might tai said also that in the conduct of
life we make, use of dchberation to justify ourselves in
doing what we want to do. And to surrender to impulse is
part of the pattern. I think a greater defect is that it leads
you to live too much in the future. 1 have long known
that this was a fault of mine and have in vain tried to
correct it. I have never, except by an effort of will, wished
that the passing moment might linger so that I could get
more enjoyment from it, for cven,whcn it has brought me
something I had immensely looked forward *to, my
imagination in the very moment of fulfilment has been
busy with the problematical delight of whatever was to
come. I have never walked down the soum side of
Piccadilly without being all in a dither about what was
happening on the north. This is folly. The passing
'moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense

34

to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day
be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present
does %ow. But <ptnmon sense avails me little. I do not
find Ae present unsatisfactory; I merely take it for
granted. It ia interwoven in the pattern and what interests
me is what remains to come.

I have made a great many mistakes. I have at times
fallen victim to a snare to which the writer is peculiarly
Uable^ die desire to carry out in my own life certain
actions which I made the charastcrs of my invention do.
1 have attempted things that were foreign to my nature
and obstinately persevered in them because in my vanity
I would not cpnfcss myself btaten. I have paid too much
attention to the opinion of others. 1 have made sacrifices
to unworthy objects because I had not the courage to
inflict pain. 1 have committed follies. I have a sensitive
conscience, and 1 have done certain things in my life that
I am unable entirely to forget; if I had been fortunate
enough to be a Catholic I could have delivered myself of
them at confession and after performing the penance
imposed received absolution .and put them out of my
mind for ever. I have had to deal with them as my
common sense suggested, I do not regret them, for I
think it is because of my own grave faults that I have
learnt indulgence to others. It to(5k me a lopg time. In
youth I was harshly intolerant. I remember jny indigna-
tion upon hearing someone make the remark, not an
original one, but new to me then, that hypocrisy was the
tribute that vice paid to virtue. I thought that one should
have the courage of one’s vices. I had ideals of honesty,
uprightness, truth; I was impatient not of human weak-
ness, but of cowardice, and 1 \voulJ make no allowances
for those who hedged anfl temporized. It never occurred
to me tlut no one stood in greater need of indulgence
than I.

id

AT FIRST sight it is curious that o\ir own offences
should seem to us so much less heinous than the offences

iJ

of others. I suppose the reason is that we know aU the
circumstances diat have occasioned theih and so manage
to excuse in ourselves what we cannot texcuse in (fthers.
We turn our attention away from our own defects, and
when we are forced by untoward events to <3onsider them
find it easy to condone them. For all I know we are right
to do this; they are part of us and we must accept the good
and the bad in ourselves together. But when we come
to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that
we judge them, but by all image that we havp formed of
ourselves from which we have left out everything that
offends our vanity or would^discredit us in the eyes of the
world. To take a trivial instance: how scornful we are
when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say
that he has never told not one, but a hundred? We are
shocked when we discover that great men were weak and
petty, dishonest or selfish, sexually vicious, vain or
intemperate; and many people think it disgraceful to dis-
close to the public its heroes* failings. There is not much
to choose between men. They are all a hotchpotch of
greatness and littleness, of virtue and vice, of nobility and
baseness. Some have more strength of character, or more
opportunity, and so in one direction or another give
their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the
same. For dny part 1* do not think I am any better or
any worse liian most people, but I know that if I set
down every action in my life and every thought that
has crossed my mind the world would consider me a
monster of depravity.

I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn
others when he reflects upon his own thoughts. A great
part of our lives is occupied in reverie, and the more
imaginative we arc, the more varied and vivid this will be.
How many of us could face having our reveries auto-
matically registered and set before us? We should be
overcome with shame. We should cry that we could not
really be as mean, as wicked, as petty, as selfish, as
obscene, as snobbish, as vain, as sentimental, as that. Yet
surely our reveries are as much part of us as our actions,
and if there were a being to whom our inmost thoughts

were known we might just as well be held responsible for
them as for our deeds. Men forget the horrible thoughts
that \rtinder through their own minds, and are indignant
when they discover them in others. In Goethe's Wahr-
heit und Diclltung he relates how in his youth he could
not bear the idea that his father was a middle-class lawyer
in Frankfurt. He felt that noble blood must flow in his
veins. So he sought to persuade himself that some prince
travelling through the city had met and loved his mother,
and that he yas the offspring of the union. The editor of
the copy I read wrote an indignant footnote on the sub-
ject. Jt seemed to him unworthy of so great a poet that
he should impugn the undoubted virtue of his mother in
order snobbishly to plume himself on his bastard aris-
tocracy. Of course it was disgraceful, but it was not
tznnatural and I venture to say not •uncommon. There
must be few romantic, rebellious and imaginative boys
who have not toyed with the idea that they could not be
the son of their dull and respectable father, but ascribe the
superiority they feel in themselves, according to their own
idiosyncrasies, to an unknowif poet, great statesman or
ruling prince. The Olympian attitude of Goethe's later
years inspires me with esteem; tins confession arouses in
me a warmer feeling. Because a man can write great
works he is none the less a man.

It is, I suppose, these lewd, ugly, baseband selfish
thoughts, dwelling in their minds against their will, that
have tormented the saints when their lives were devoted
to good works and repentance had redeemed the sins of
their past. St. Ignatius Loyola, as we know, when he
went to Monserrat made a general confession and re-
ceived absolution; but he continued to be obsessed by a
sense of siji so that he was(6n the point of killing himself.
Till his conversion he had led the ordinary life of the
young man of good birth at that time; he was somewhat
vain of his appearance, he had wenched and gambled; but
at least on one occasion he had shown rare magnanimity
and he had always been honourable, loyal, generous and
brave. If peace was still denied him it looks as though it
was his thoughts that he could not forgive himself. It

37

would be a comfort to know that evep the saints were
thus afflicted. When I have seen the great ones' of the
earth, so upright and dignified, sitting iif state I havi often
asked myself whctlier at such moments they ever remem-
bered how their minds in solitude were sometimes occu-
pied and whether it ever made them uneasy to think of the
secrets that their subliminal self harboured. It seems to
me that the knowledge that these reveries are common to
all men should inspire one with tolerance to oneself as
well as to others. It is well also if they enabk us to look
upon our fellows, even the most eminent and respectable,
with humour and if they le%d us to take ourselves n©t too
seriously. When I have heard judges bn the bench
moralizing with unction I have asked myself whether it
was possible for them to have forge^tten their humanity
so completely as tluiir words suggested. I have wished
that beside his bunch of flowers at the Old Bailey, his
lordship had a packet of toilet paper. It would remind
him that he was a man like any other.

V

I HAVE been called cynical. I have been accusc’d of
making men out wojse than they are. I do not think I
have done this. All I have done is to bring into promin-
ence certain traits that many writers shut tfieir eyes to. I
think what has chiefly struck me in human beings is their
lack of consistency. I have never seen people all of a
piece. It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits
should exist in the same person and for all that yield a
plausible harmony. I have often asked myself how
characteristics, seemingly irreconcilable, can exist in the
same person. I have Imown crooks who weue capable of
self-sacrifice, sneak-thieves who were sweet-patured and
harlots for whom it was a point of honour tp give good
value for money. The only explanation I can offer is that
so instinctive is each one’s conviction that he is unique in
the world, and privileged, that he feels that, however
wrong it might be for others, what he for his part does,
of not nature and right, is at least venial. The contrast

that I have foupd in people has interested me, but I do
not think I have unduly emphasized it. The censure that
has &om time tb time been passed on me is due perhaps
to the fact that I have not e3q)ressly condemned what was
bad in the (maracters of my invention and praised what
was good. It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely
shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect
me, and even when they do I have learnt at last generally
to excuse them. It is meet pot to expect too much
of others. .You should be grateful when they treat you
well, but unperturbed when they treat you ill. ‘For
every one of us,’ as the Ath^an Stranger said, ‘is made
pretty much Vhat he is by the bent of his desires and the
nature of his soul.’ It is want of imagination that pre-
vents ne from seeing things from any point of view
but their own, and it is unreasonatile to be angry with
them because they lack this faculty.

I think I could be justly blamed if I saw only people’s
faults and were blind to their virtues. I am not conscious
that this is the case. There is nothing m >re beautiful than
goodness and it has pleased ihe very often to show how
much of it th' re is in persons who by common standards
would be relentlessly condemned. I have shown it
because I have seen it. It has seamed to me sometimes
to shine more brightly in them because it was surrounded
by the darkness of sin. I take the goodness ’of the good
for granted and I am amused when 1 discover their defects
or their vices; I am touched v-hen I see the goodness of
the wicked ard I am willing enough to sluug a tolerant
shoulder at their wickedness. I am not my brother’s
keeper. I cannot bring myself to judge my fellows; I am
content to observe them. My obserration has led me to
believe that, all in all, Uiete is not so much difference
between the good and the bad as the moralists would have
us believe.

1 have not on the whole taken people at their face
value. I do not know if this coolness of scrutiny has been
inherited from my fathers; they could hardly have been
successful lawyers if they had not possessed a shrewdness
that prevented them from being deceived by appearances;

39

or if I owe it to the lack in me of that joyful uprush of
emotion on meeting people that makes many, as the
saj^ng is, take their geese for swans, it was certainly
encouraged by my training as a medical student. I did
not want to be a doctor. I did not want to*be anything
but a writer, but I was much too shy to say so, and in
any case at that time it was unheard of that a boy of
eighteen, belonging to a respectable family, should adopt
literature as a profession. The notion was so preposterous
that I never even dreamt of imparting it to anybody. I
had always supposed that I should enter the law, but my
three brothers, much older tjpian I, were practising it«and
there did not seem room for me too.

iS

I LEFT school early. I had been unhappy at the prepara-
tory school to which I was sent on my father’s death
because it was at Ginterbury and only six miles from
Whitstable of which my uncle and guardian was vicar.
It was an annex of the King’s School, an ancient foimda-
tion, and to this when I was thirteen I duly went. After
I had got out of the lower forms, the masters of wluch
were frightening bullies, I was contented enough, and I
was miserable when an illness forced me to spend a term
in the Soutlf of France. My mother and her only sister
had died of tuberculosis and when it w?s found that my
lungs were affected my uncle and aunt were concerned.
I was placed at a tutor’s at Hyires. When I went back
to Canterbury I did not hke it so well. My friends had
made new friends. I was lonely. I had been moved
into a higher form in which, with three months lost, I
could not find my place. My form-master nagged me.
I persuaded my uncle that it would be very good for my
lungs if instead of staying at school I spent tho following
winter on the Riviera and that it would be of value to me
after that to go to Germany and learn German. I could
continue to work there on the subjects which were
necessary for me to get into Cambridge. He was a weak
man and my arguments were specious. He did not

40

much like me, for which I cannot blame him, since I do
not thhik I was«a likeable boy, and as it was my own
money that was Joeing spent on my education, he was
willing enough to let me do as I chose. My aunt greatly
favoured my plan. She was herself German, penniless but
of noble birth; her family had a coat of arms with sup-
porters and a great number of quarterings, of which
she was primly arrogant. I have related elsewhere how,
though but a poor clergyman’s wife, she would not call
on the wife of an opulent banker who had taken a house
for the sum*mer nearby because he was in trade. It was
she who arranged that I should go to a family in Heidel-
berg *whom sfe had heard 6f through her relations in
Munich.

But when I came back from Germany, aged eighteen,
I had v c^ecided views of my owq about my future. I
had been happier than ever before. I had for the first
time tasted freedom and I could not beat the thought of
going to Cambridge and being subjected once more to
restraint. I felt myself a man and 1 had a great eagerness
to enter at once upon life. \ felt that there was not a
moment to waste. My uncle had always hoped that I
would go inti> the church, though he should have known
that, stammering as I did, no profession could have been
more imsuitable; and when I told him that I wouldn’t,
he accepted with his usual indifference mjr refusal to
go to Cambridge. I still remember the rather absurd
arguments that were held about the calling 1 should adopt.
A suggestion was made that I should become a civil
servant and my uncle wrote to an old Oxford friend of his
who held an important position in the Home Office for
his advice. It was that, owing to the system of examina-
tions and the class of pe/sons it had introduced into the
government service, it was now no place for a gentleman.
That settled that. It was finally decided that I should
become a doctor.

The medical profession did not interest me, but
it gave me the chance of living i:* London and so
gaining the experience of life that I hankered after. I
entered St. Thomas’s Hospital in the autumn of 1892, I

4 ^

Tai SUMMIN* U». D

found the first two years of the curriculum very dull and
gave my work no more attention than<was necessary to
scrape through the examinations. 1 was an unsatisfactory
student. But I had the freedom I yearned for. 1 liked
having lodgings of my own, where I could be by myself;
I took pride in making them pretty and comfortable. AU
my spare time, and much that I should have devoted to
my medical studies, I spent reading and writing. I read
enormously; I filled note-books with ideas for stories and
plays, scraps of dialogue and reflections, very ingenuous
ones, on what my reading and the various' ejqperiences
that I was undergoing suggested to me. I entered little
into the life of the hospital and made few friends fhere,
for I was occupied with other things; but when, after two
years, I became a clerk in the out-patient’s departments
I began to grow in'-crcsted. In due course I started to
work in the wards and then my interest so much increased
that when I caught septic tonsillitis through doing a post-
mortem on a corpse that was in an unreasonable state of
decomposition and had to take to my bed, I covJd not
wait to get well to resumr my dudes. I had to attend a
certain number of confinements to g§t a certificate and
this meant going into the slums of Lambeth, often .into
foul courts that die police hesitated to enter, but in which
my black bag amply- protected me: 1 found the work
absorbing, por a short period I was on accident duty day
and night to give first aid to urgent cases. It left me tired
out but wonderfully exhilarated.

19

FOK HERE I was in contact with what I most wanted,
life in the raw. In those three yqars I must have witnessed
pretty well every emotion of which man i$ capable. It
appealed to my dramadc instinct. It excite^ the novelist
in me. Even now that forty years have jiassed I can
remember certain people so exactly that I Oould draw a
picture of them. Phrases that I heard then Still linger on
my ears, 1 saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain.
1 saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; 1 saw the

4 ^

dark lines that despair drew on a iacc; I saw courage and
steadfastness. I law faith shine in the eyes of those who
trusted in what \ could only think was an illusion and I
saw the gallantry that made a man greet the prognosis of
death with aft ironic joke because he was too proud to let
those about him see the terror of his soul.

At that time (a time to most people of sufficient ease,
when peace seemed certain and prosperity secure) there
was a school of writers who eidarged upon the moral
value of suffering. They claimed that it was salutary.
They claimed that it increased sympathy and enhanced the
sensij)ilities. They claimed that it opened to the spirit new
avenues of beauty and enabled it to get into touch with
the mystical kingdom of God. They claimed that it
strengthened the character, purified it from its human
grossness and brought to him whe did not avoid but
sought it a more perfect happiness. Several books on
these lines had a great success and their authors, who
lived in comfortable homes, had three meals a day and
were in robust health, gained much reputation. I set
down in my note-books, not once or twice, but in a dozen
places, the facts that I had seen. 1 knew that suffering
did*not ennoble; it degraded. It made men selfish, mean,
petty and suspicious. It absorbed them in small things.
It did not make them more than men; it made them less
than men; and I wrote fen'ciously that we Isam resigna-
tion not by our own suiFcring, but by the suffering of
others.

All this was a valuable experience to me. I do not
know a better training for a writer than to spend some
years in the medical profession. I suppose that you can
learn a good deal about human nature in a solicitor’s
office; but there on the whole you have to deal with men
in full control of themselves. They lie perhaps as much
as they lip to the doctor, but they lie more consistently,
and it may be that for the solicitor it is not so necessary to
know the truth. The interests he deals with, besides, are
usually material. He sees human nature from a specialized
standpoint. But the doctor, especially the hospital doctor,
sees it bare. Reticences can genei^ly be undermined;

4S

very often there are none. Fear for the most part will
shatter every defence; even vanity is unn&ved by it. Most
people have a furious itch to talk aboi\t themselves and
are restrained only by the disinclination of others to listen.
Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most
of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs. 'T'he doctor
is discreet. It is his business to listen and no details are
too intimate for liis ears.

But of course human nature may be displayed before
you and if you have not the eyes to see you will learn
nothing. If you are hidebound with prejuciicc, if your
temper is sentimental, you can go through the war^s of
a hospital and be as ignorant of man at the end as you
were at the beginning. If you want to get any benefit
from such an experience you must have an open mind and
an interest in human beings. I look upon myself as very
fortunate in that though 1 have never much liked men I
have found them so interesting that I am almost incapable
of being bored by them. 1 do not particularly want to talk
and I am very willing to listen. I do not care if people arc
interested in me or not. If have no desire to impart any
knowledge I have to others nor do I feel the need to
correct them if they are wrong. You can get a great deal
of entertainment out of tedious people if you keep your
head. I remember being taken for a drive in a foreign
country by 9 kind lady who wanted to show me round.
Her conversation was composed entirely of truisms
and she had so large a vocabulary of hackneyed phrases
that I despaired of remembering them. But one remark
she made has stuck in my memory as have few witticisms;
we passed a row of little houses by the sea and she said
to me: ‘Those are week-end bungalows, if you under-
stand what I mean; in other words they’re bungalows that
people go to on Saturdays and leave on Mondays.’ I
should have been sorry to miss that.

I do not want to spend too long a time with boring
people, but then I do not want to spend too long a time
with amusing ones. I find social intercourse fatiguing.
Most persons, I think, are both exhilarated and rested by
conversation; to me it has always been an effort. When

44

1 was young an^ stammeted, to talk for long singularly
exhausted me, and even now that I have to some extent
cured myself, it is a strain. It is a relief to me when 1 can
get away and read a book.

10

I WOULD not claim for a moment that those years I
spent at St. Thomas’s Hospital gave me a complete know-
ledge of human nature. I do not suppose anyone can hope
to have that. I have been studying it, consciously and
subconsciously, for forty years and I still find men
unaccountable; people I Imow intimately can surprise me
by some action of which I never thought them capable
or by thi '^i«!covery of some trait exhibit a side of them-
selves that I never even suspected. It is possible that my
training gave me a warped view, for at St. Thomas’s the
persons I came in contact with were for the most part sick
and poor and ill-educated. I have tried to guard against
this. I have tried also to guard against my own pre-
possessions. Ihavenonaturaftrustinothcrs, I am more
inclined to expect them to do ill than to do good. That is
the*price one has to pay for having a sense of humour. A
sense of humour leads you to take pleasure in the dis-
crepancies of human nature; it leads you to mistrust great
professions and look for the unworthy moth^e that they
conceal; the disparity between appearance and reality
diverts you and you are apt when you cannot find it to
create it. You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty
and goodness because they give no scope to your sense
of the ridiculous. The humorist has a quick eye for the
humbug; he does not always recognize the saint. But if
to see men one-sidedly iS a heavy price to pay for a sense
of humour there is a compensation that has a value too.
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them.
Humour teaches tolerance, and the humorist, with a smile
and perhaps a sigh, is more likely to shrug his shoulders
than to condemn. He does not moralize, he is content to
understand; and it is true that to understand is to pity
and forgive.

But 1 must admit that, with these t^servatioos that 1
have tried alwa 3 rs to remember, the experience of all
the years that Jhave followed Im only confirmed the
observations on human nature that I made, not deliber-
ately, for I was too young, but unconscious^, in the out-
patients’ departments and in the wards of St. Thomas’s
Hospital. I have seen men since as I saw them then, and
thus have I drawn them. It may not be a true picture and
I know that many have thought it an unpleasant one. It
is doubtless partial, for naturally I have seen men through
my own idiosyncrasies. A buoyant, optimistic, healthy
and sentimental person \yo\ild have seen the Fame
people quite differently. I can only claim to have seen
them coherently. Many writers seem to me not to observe
at aU, but to create their characters in stock sizes from
images in their owif fancy. They are like draughtsmen
who draw their figures from recollections of the antique
and have never attempted to draw from the living
model. At their best they can only give living shape to
the fantasies of their own minds. If their minds are noble
they can give you noble figures and perhaps it does not
matter if they lack the infimte complication of common
life.

I have always worked from the living model. I
remember that once in the Dissecting Room when I was
going over 'my ‘part’ with the Demonstrator, he asked
me what some nerve was and I did not know. He told
me; whereupon I remonstrated, for it was in the wrong
place. Nevertheless he insisted that it was the nerve I
had been in vain looking for. I complained of the
abnormality and he, smiling, said that in anatomy it was
the normal that was uncommon. I was only annoyed at
the time, but the remark sank into my miqd and since
then it has been forced upon me that it was true of man as
well as of anatomy. The normal is what ]tou find but
rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one
fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to
find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
It is this false picture that the writers I have spoken
of take as their model and it is because they describe

what is so exceptional that they seldom achieve the
effect of life. Selfishness and kindliness, idealism and
sensuality, vanity, shyness, disinterestedness, courage,
laziness, nervousness, obstinacy, and diffidence, they can
all exist in a single person and form a plausible harmony.
It has taken a long time to persuade readers of the truth
of this.

I do not suppose men in past centuries were any
different from the men we know, but they must surely
have appeared to their contemporaries more of a piece
than they do to us now, or writers would not have
thuswpresented them. It seamed reasonable to describe
every man in his humour. The miser was nothing but
miserly, the fop foppish, and the glutton gluttonous.
It never < '■''utred to anyone that the miser might be
foppish and gluttonous; and yet we See constantly people
who are; still less, that he might be an honest and upright
man with a disinterested zeal for public service and a
genuine passion for art. When novelists began to disclose
the diversity that they had found in themselves or seen
in others they were accused* of maligning the human
race. So far .s I know the first novelist who did this
witA deliberate intention was Stendhal in Le Rouge ct
le Noir. Contemporary criticism was outraged. Even
Saintc-Beuve, who needed only to look into Ids own
heart to discover what contrary qualities •could exist
side by side in some kind of harmony, took him to task.
Julien Sorel is one of the most interesting characters
that a novelist has ever created. I do not think that
Stendhal has succeeded in making him entirely plausible,
but that, I believe, is due to causes that I shall mention
in another part of this book. For the first three-quarters
of the novel he is perfectly consistent. Sometimes he
fills you with horror; sometimes he is entirely sympathetiq
but he has an inner coherence, so that though you often
shudder you accept.

But it was long before Stcndhal^s example bore fruit.
Balzac, with all his genius, drew his characters after the
old models. He gave them his own immense vitality
so that you accept them as real; but in fact they arc

47

humours as definitely as are the characteiis of old comedy.
His people are unforgettable, but they are seen from
the standpoint of the ruling passion tltat affected those
with whom they were brought in contact. I suppose it is
a natural prepossession of mankind to take people as
though they were homogeneous. It is evidently less
trouble to make up one’s mind about a man one way or
the other and dismiss suspense with the phrase, he’s one of
the best or he’s a dirty dog. It is disconcerting to find that
the saviour of his country may be stingy or that the poet
who has opened new horizons to our consciousness
may be a snob. Our natiual egoism leads us to judge
people in their relation to ourselves. We want them
to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they
are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore
it.

These reasons perhaps explain why there is so great a
disinclination to accept the attempts to portray man with
his incongruous and diverse qualities and why people
turn away with dismay when candid biographers reveal
the truth about famous persons. It is distressing to think
that the composer of the quintet in the Meistersmger was
dishonest in money matters and treacherous to those who
had benefited him. But it may be that he could not have
had grek qualities if he had not also had great failings. I
do not behave they arc right who say that the defects of
famous men should be ignored; I think it is better that we
should know them. Then, though wc arc conscious of
having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that
is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their
virtues.

21

BESIDES TEACHING me something about human
nature my training in a medical school fut'nished me with
an elementary knowledge of science and scientific method.
Till then I been concerned only with art and litera-
ture. It was a very limited knowledge, for the demands
of the curriculum at that time were small, but at all

4 »

events it showed me the toad that led to a region of which
I was completely ignorant. I grew familiar with certain
principles. Th9 scientific world of which I thus obtained
a cursory gj^pse was rigidly materialistic and because its
conceptions coincided with my own prepossessions I
embraced them with alacrity: ‘For men,* as Pope ob-
served, ‘let them say what they will, never approve
any other’s sense, but as it squares with their own.’ I
was glad to learn that the mind of man (himself the
product of natural causes) was a function of the brain
subject like the rest of his body to the laws of cause and
dfoct and that these laws^were the same as those that
governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted
at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast
machine in which every event was determined by a
preceding event so that nothing dould be other than it
was. These conceptions not only appealed to my
dramatic instinct; they filled me besides with a very
delectable sense of liberation. With the ferocity of youth
I welcomed the hypothesis of the Survival of the Fittest.
It gave me much satisfactioA to learn that the earth was
a speck of mud whirling roimd a second-rate star which
was gradually cooling; and that evolution, which had
produced man, would by fotqing him to adapt himself to
his environment deprive him of all the qualities he had
acquired but those that were necessary to enable him to
combat the increasing cold till at last the planet, an icy
cinder, would no longer support even a vestige of life.
I believed that we were wretched puppets at the mercy
of a ruthless fate; and that, bound by the inexorable laws
of nature, we were doomed to take part in the ceaseless
struggle for existence with notlung to look forward to
but inevitable defeat. 1 learnt that men were moved by
a savage egoism, that love was only the dirty trick nature
played on us to achieve the continuation of the species,
and I decided that, whatever aims men set themselves,
they were deluded, for it was impossible for them to aim
at anything but their own selfish pleasures. When once
I happened to do a friend a good turn (,fot what reasons,
since I knew that all our actions were purely selfish, I did

49

not stop to think) and wanting to shoy his gratitude
(which of course he had no business to feel, for my
apparent kindness was rigidly determined) he asked me
what I would like as a present, I answered without
hesitation Herbert Spencer’s First Principles. I read
it with complacency. But I was impatient of Spencer’s
maudlin belief in progress: the world I knew was going
from bad to worse and I was as pleased as Punch at the
thought of my remote descendants, having long forgotten
art and science and handicraft, cowering slan-c^d in
caverns as they watched the approach of the cold and
eternal night. I was violently pessimistic. All the same,
having abundant vitality, I was getting on the whole a
lot of fun out of life. I w-as ambitious to make a name for
myself as a writer. I exposed myself to every vicissitude
that seemed to offer* a chance of gaining the greater
experience that I wanted and 1 read everything 1 could
lay my hands on.

22

I LIVED at this time in a group of young men who
had by nature gifts that seemed to me much superior ‘to
mine. They could write and draw and compose with
a fedlitythat aroused my envy. They had an appre-
ciation of ar> and a critical instinct that I despaired of
attaining. Of these some died without fulfilling the
promise I thought they had and the rest have lived on
without distinction. I know now that all they had was
the natural creativity of youth. To write prose and verse,
to hammer out little tunes on the piano and to draw and
paint, are instinctive with a great many young persons.
It is a form of play, due merely to the exuberance of
their years, and is no more significant than a child’s
building of a castle on the sands. I suspect t|iat it was
my own ingenuousness that led me to admir^ so much
Ac ffifts of my friends. If I had been less ignorant I
might have seen that the opinions that seenKd to me
so original were theirs only at second-hand and that their
verses and their music owed more to a retentive memory

than to a lively j^lagination. The point I want to make is
diat dtis facility is, if not universal, so common that one
can draw no conclusions from it. Youth is the inspira-
tion. One of the tragedies of the arts is the spectade of
the vast nuJnber of persons who have been misled by
this passing fertility to devote their lives to the effort
of creation. Their invention deserts them as they grow
older, and they are faced witli the long years before them
in which, unfitted by now for a more humdrum calling,
they harass their wearied brain to beat out material it is
incapable of giving them. They are lucky when, with
wliat bitterness we know, tlyy can make a living in ways,
like journalism or teaching, that are allied to the a)ts.

Of course it is from among those who possess by
nature this facility that the artist is produced. Without it
he cannot h-jve tdent; but it is only a part of talent. We
start by living, each one of us, in the solitariness of our
own minds and from the data given us and our communi-
cations with other minds we construct the outside world
to suit our needs. Because we are all the result of one
evolutionary process, and ottr environment is more or
less the same, the constructions we make are roughly
similar. For ''onvenience and simplicity we accept them
as identical and speak of a common world. The pecu-
liarity of the artist is that he is in some particular different
from other men and so the world of his* construction
is different too. It is this idiosyncrasy that is the better

E art of his equipment. When the picture he draws of
is private world appeals to a certain number of persons,
either by its strangeness, its intrinsic interest or its
correspondence with their own prepossessions (for none
of us is quite the same as his neighbour, only rather
like, and not everyone accepts the world common to us
all in every respect) his talent will be acknowledged. If
he is a writer he wiU fulfil some need in the nature of his
readers and they will lead with him a life of the spirit
that satisfies them better than the life circumstances mve
forced on them. But there are others to whom tlus
idiosyncrasy does not appeal. They have no patience with
the world constructed by its instrumentality. It may

actually tevolt them. Then the attist ha^ nothing to say
to them and they will deny his talent.

I do not believe that genius is an entirely diiFetent
thing from talent. I am not even sure that it depends on
any great difference in the artist’s naturaSl gifts. For
example, I do not think that Cervantes had an exceptional
gift for writing; few people would deny him genius. Nor
would it be easy in English literature to find a poet with a
happier gift than Herrick and yet no one would claim
that he had more than a delightful talent. It seems to me
that what makes genius is the combination of natural gifts
for creation with an idiosyncrasy that enables its possessor
to see the world personally in the highest degree and yet
with such catholicity that his appeal is not to this type of
man or to that type, but to all men. His private world is
that of common meA, but ampler and more pithy. His
communication is universal and though men may not be
able to tell exactly what it signifies they feel that it is
important. He is supremely normal. By a happy
accident of nature seeing life with immense vivacity, as
it were at concert pitch, ‘he sees it, with its inf^te
diversity, in the healthy way that mankind at large sees it.
In Matthew Arnold’s phrase he sees it steadily and sees it
whole. But genius arises once or twice in a century. The
lesson of'anatomy applies: there is nothing so rare as the
normal. It k foolish to do as many do now and call a
man a genius because he has written half a dozen clever
plays or painted a score of good pictures. It is very well
to have talent; few people have. With talent the artist
will only reach the second class, but that need not disturb
him for it contains the names of many whose works have
uncommon merit. When you think it has produced such
novels as Le Rouge et le Noir, such poems as The
Shropshire Lad, such paintings as those of Watteau, there
is not much to be ashamed of. Talent cannot reach the
utmost heights, but it can show you many an Unexpected
and delicious view, an unfrequented dell, a. bubbling
brook or a romantic cavern, cn the way that leads to
them. The frowardness of human nature is such that it
falters sometimes when it is bidden to take the broadest

ra

of all surveys of human nature. It will shrink from the
splendour of Tolstoi’s War and Peace to cum with com-
placency to Voltaire’s Gindide. It would be hard to live
always with Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel,
but anyone tould do with one of Constable’s pictures of
Salisbury Cathedral.

My sympathies are limited. I can only be myself, and
partly by nature, party by the circumstances of my life, it
is a partial self. I am not a social person. I cannot get
drunk and feel a great love for iny fdlow-men. Convivial
amusement has always somewhat bored me. When
people sitting in an ale-house or drifting down the river in
a boat start singing I am silent. I have never even sung a
hymn. I do not much like being touched and I have
always to make a slight effort over myself not to draw
away whf‘f> someone links his arm m mine. I can never
forget myself. 'Ihe hysteria of the world repels me and I
never feel more aloof than when I am in the midst of a
throng surrendered to a violent feeling of mirth or
sorrow. Though I have been in love a good many times
I have never experienced the bliss of requited love. I
know that this is the best thing that life can offer and it is
a thing that almost all men, though perhaps only for a
short time, have enjoyed. I have most loved people
who cared little or nothing for me and when people have
loved me I have been embarrassed. It has been a predica-
ment that I have not quite known how to deal with. In
order not to hurt their feelings I have often acted a
passion that I did not feel. I have tried, with gentleness
when possible, and if not, with irritation, to escape from
the trammels with which their love bound me. I have
been jealous of my independence. I am incapable of
complete surrender. And so, never having felt some oi
the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible
that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human
touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers
alone can give.

IT IS dangerous to let the public behind die scenes. They
are easily disillusioned and then they are angty with you,
fdr it was the illusion they loved; they do not understand
that udiat interests you is the way in which you have
created the illusion, Anthony Trollope ceased to be read
for thirty years because he confessed that he wrote at
regular hours and took care to get the best price he could
for his work.

But for me the race now is neatly tun and it woujd ill
become me to conceal the truth. I do not.want anyone
to think better of me than I deserve. Let those who like
me take me as I am and let the rest leave me. I have more
character than brains*and more brains than specific gifts.

I said something of this sort many yeais ago to a charming
and distinguished critic. I do not know what led me to
do so, since 1 am not much inclined to talk about myself
in generd company. It was at Montdidier, duting the first
months of the war, and wt were lunching there on our
way to P^ronne. We had been very hard-worked for
some days and it -was a pleasure to huger over a meal that
seemed to our healthy appetites uncommonly good. I
suppose* 1 was flushed witJi wmc and I daresay cxcited-
by the discewety, from a statue in the market-place, that
Montdidier was the birthplace of Parmentier, who
introduced the potato into France. Anyhow as we idled
over our coffee and liqueurs I was moved to give an
acute and candid analysis of my talent. I was discon-
certed some years later to read it, almost in my verj
words, in the columns of an important paper. I was a
trifle vexed, for it is a very different thing to tell the truth
about yourself and to have somebody else te|l it, and I
should have hked the critic to do me the con^liment of
saying that he had heard it all from my own hps. But I
cmd myself. I thought it very natural that he Should like
to think that he had so much p'’rspicacity. And it was the
truth. It has been a little unfortunate for me, since the
critic is deservedly influential and what he said in this

H

article has been very generally repeated. In another
moment of fcadkness I informed my readers that I was
unusually competent. One would think that except for
this the critics would never have discovered it; but since
then the adfective has been much and depreciatingly
applied to me. It has seemed strange to me t^t so many
people concerned, though only at second-hand, with the
arts should regard competence with so little favour.

1 am told that there are natural singers and made
singers. Though of course he i.»ust have something of a
voice the made singer owes the better part of his accom-
plisl^ent to training; with taste and musical ability he
can eke out <'he relative pdVerty of his organ and his
singing can afford a great deal of pleasure, especially to
the connoisseur; but he will never move you as you are
moved to ecstasy by the pure, bird-bke notes of the
natural singer. The natural singer may be inadequately
trained, he may have neither tact nor knowledge, he may
outrage all the canons of art, but such is the magic of his
voice that you are captivated. You forgive the liberties
he takes, his vulgarities, his appeals to obvious emotion,
when those heavenly sounds enchant your car. I am a
made writer. But it would be vanity if I thought that
such results as I have acliicvcd on myself were due to a
.design that I deliberately carried out. T vras drawn to
^various courses by very simple motives and jt is only on
looking back that I discover myself subconsciously
working to a certain end. The end was to develop my
character and so make up for the deficiencies in my
natural gifts.

I have a clear and logical brain, but not a very subtle
nor a very powerful one. For long I wished it were
better. I used to get exasperated because it would not do
for me nearly as much as I wished. 1 was like a mathe-
matician who could do no more than add and subtract
and though he wanted to tackle all matmer of complicated
operations knew that he simply had not the capacity. It
took me a long time to resign myself to making the best
of what I had. I think it was a good ent ugh brain to have
brought me success in wlutevet profession I had

//

adopted. I am not one of those persons who is a fool
at everything but his own speciality. In law, medicine and
politics a clear mind and insight into men are useful.

I have had one advantage; I have never wanted a sub-
ject. I have always had more stories in my^head than I
ever had time to write. I have often heard writers com-
plain that they wanted to write but had nothing to write
about, and I remember one distinguished author telling
me that she was reading through some book in which
were epitomized all the plots that had ever been used in
order to find a theme. I have never found myself in
such a predicament. Swift, as we know, who claimed that
he could write on any subject whatever, ,whcn he was
challenged to write a discourse on a broomstick acquitted
himself very creditably. I am almost inclined to say that
I could not spend an hour in anyone’s company without
getting the material to write at least a readable story
about him. It is pleasant to have so many stories in mind
that whatever your mood you have one upon which, for
an hour or two, for a week or so, you can let your fancy
linger. Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagina-
tion; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is
not as with oAer men an escape from reality, but. the
means by which he accedes to it. Ilis reverie is purpose-
ful. It- affords him a delight in comparison with which
the pleasure, s of sense are pale and it affords him the
assurance of his freedom. One cannot wonder if some-
times he is unwilling to exchange its enjoyment for the
drudgery and loss of execution.

But though I have had variety of invention, and this
is not strange since it is the outcome of the variety of
mankind, I have had small power of imagination. I have
taken living people and put them into the situations,
tragic or comic, that their characters suggested. I might
well say that they invented their own stories. I have been
incapable of those great, sustained flights that carry the
author on broad pinions into a celestial sphere. My
fancy, never very strong, has bcei hampered by my
sense of probability. I have painted easel pictures, not
frescoes.

I HEARTILY wish that in my youth I had had someone
of good sense to direct my reading. I sigh when I
reflect on the amount of time I have wasted on books that
were of no great profit to me. What little guidance I had
I owe to a young man who came to live with the same
family in Heidelberg as I was living with. I will call him
Brown. He was then twenty-six. After leaving Cam-
bridge he was called to the bar, but he had a little money,
enough to live on in those inexpensive days, and finding
the law distasteful he had made up his mind to devote
himself to literature. He came to Heidelberg to learn
German. I knew him till his death forty years later. For
twenty he amused himself with thinking what he
would write when he really got down to it and for another
twenty with what he could have written if the fates had
been kinder. He wrote a good deal of verse. He had
neither imagination, nor passion; and he had a defective
ear. He spent some years trat&lating those dialogues of
Plato that had been already most often translated. I
douBt, however, if he ever got to the end of one. He was
completely devoid of will-power. He was sentimental
and vain. Though short he was handsome, with finely
cut features and curly hair; he had pale bluc^eyes and a
wistful expression. He looked as one imagines a poet
should look. As an old man, after a life of complete
indolence, bald and emaciated, he had an ascetic air so
that you might have taken him for a don who had spent
long years in ardent and disinterested research. The
spirituality of his expression suggested the tired scep-
ticism of a philosopher who had plumbed the secrets
of existence and discovered nothing but vanity. Having
gradually wasted his small fortune, he preferred to live on
the generosity of others rather than work, and often he
found it difficult to make both ends meet. His self-
complacency never deserted him. It enabled him to
endure poverty with resignation and failure with in-
difference. 1 do not think he ever had an inkling that he

J7

Tn sviomra u». j.

was an outrageous sham. His whole life was a lie, but
when he was dying, if he had known he was going to,
which mercifully he didn’t, I am coir/inced he would
have looked upon it as well-spent. He l^d charm, he
was devoid of envy, and though too selfish to do anyone
a good turn, he was incapable of unkindness. He had a
real appreciation of literature. During the long walks we
took together over the hills of Heidelberg he talked to
me of books. He tallied to me of Italy and Greece,
neither of which in point of fact he knew, but he fired my
young imagination and I began to learn Italian. I
accepted ever3rthing he toH me with the fervour of the
proselyte. I should not blame him bccadse he inspired
me with a passionate admiration for certain works that
time has shown to be not so admirable. When he arrived
he found me reading Tom Jones, which I had got out of
the public library, and he told me that of course there was
no harm in it, but I should do better to read Diana of
the Crossways. Even then he was a Platonist and he
gave me Shelley’s translation of the Symposium. He
talked to me of Renan, Cardinal Newman and Matthew
Arnold. But Matthew Arnold, he thought, was a bit of
a philistine himself. He talked to me of Swinburne’s
Poems and Ballads and of Omar Khayyim. He knew a
great many of the quatrains by heart and recited them to
me on our Valks. I was divided between enthusiasm for
the romantic epicureanism of the matter and the em-
barrassment occasioned by Brown’s delivery, for he
recited poetry like a high-church curate intoning the
Litany in an ill-lit crypt. But the two writers that it was
really necessary to admire if you would be a person of
culture and not a British philistine were Walter Pater and
George Meredith. I was very ready to do what I was told
to achieve this desirable end and incredible as it must seem
I read The Shaving of Shagpat with roars of laughter. It
seemed to me superlatively funny. Then I read the
novels of George Meredith one after the other. I thought
them wonderfid; but not so wonderful as even to myself
I pretended. My admiration was fictitious. I admired
because it was the part of a ctiltured young man to admire.

I intoxicated myself with my own enthusiasm. I would
not listen to the still small voice within me t^t carped.
Now I know th 9 .t there is a great deal of hisdan in these
novels. But the strange thing is that, reading them
again, 1 reca{>ture the days when I first read them. They
are rich for me now with sunny mornings and my
awakening intelligence and the delicious dreams of youth,
so that even as I close a novel of Meredith's, Evan
Harrington for instance, and decide that its insincerity
is exasperating, its snobbishnesit loathsome, its verbosity
intolerable and I will never read another, my heart melts
and I think it’s gmnd.

On the other hand I have no such feeling about
Walter Pater whom I read at the same time and with a
similar excitement. No pleasant associations give him for
me a mcnt co which he ^ no claim. I find him as dull as
a picture of Alma Tadema. It is strange that one can ever
have admired that prose. It does not flow. There is no
air in it. A careful mosaic constructed by someone with-
out great technical skill to decorate the walls of a station
dining-room. Pater’s attitudetowards the life about him,
cloistered, faintly supercilious, gentlemanly, donnish in
shott, repels me. Art should be appreciated with passion
and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that
fears the censoriousness of a common-room. But Walter
Pater was a feeble creature: it is unnccessary»to condemn
him with intensity. I dislike him not for himself, but
because he is an example of a type in the literary world
that is common and detestable. This is the person who is
filled with the conceit of culture.

The value of culture is its effect on character. It
avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that.
Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness. Too
often, as we know, it rives rise to self-complacency. Who
has not seen the scholar’s thin-lipped smile when he
corrects a misquotation and the connoisseur’s pained
look when someone praises a picture he does not cate
for? There is no more merit in having xead a thousand
books than in having ploughed a thousand fields. There
is no more merit in being able to attach a correct descrip-

Jf

don to a picture than in being able to find out what is
wrong wim a stalled motor-cat. In each case it is special
knowledge. The stockbroker has his knpwledge too and
so has the ardzan. It is a silly prejudice of the intellectual
that his is the only one that counts. The Trbe, the Good
and the Beaudful are not the perquisites of those who
have been to expensive schools, burrowed in libraries and
frequented museiims. The artist has no excuse when he
uses others with condescension. He is a fool if he thinks
his knowledge is more ifhportant than theirs and an oaf
if he cannot comfortably meet them on an equal foodng.
Matthew Arnold did a great^disservice to culture when he
insisted on its opposidon to philistinism. •

■ 2 /

AT EIGtlTEEN I knew French, German and some
Italian, but 1 was extremely uneducated and I was deeply
conscious of my ignorance. I read everything that came
my way. My curiosity was such that I was as willing to
read a history of Peru or the reminiscences of a cowboy as
a treatise on Provengal poetry or the Confessions of
St. Augustine. I suppose it gained me a certain amoudt of
general knowledge which is useful for the novelist to
have. One never knows when an out of the way bit of
information*will come in handy. I made lists of what I
read and one of these lists by some accident I stiU have.
It is my reading for two months and, but that I made it
only for myself, I could not believe that it was veracious.
It shows that I read three of Shakespeare's plays, two
volumes of Mommsen’s History of Rome, a large part of
Lanson’s Litt^rature Fran 9 aise, two or three novels, some
of the French classics, a couple of scientific wodts and a
play of Ibsen's. I was indeed the industrious apbrendce.
During the time I was at St. Thomas's Hospit^ I went
systematically through Englisl^ French, Italian apd Latin
literature. I read a lot of history, a little philosophy
and a good deal of science. My curiosity was too great
to allow me to give much time to reflect upoa what I
read; I could hardly wait to finish one book, so eager was

(0

I to begin another. This was always an adventore, and
I would start upon a famous work as excitedly as a
reasonable young man would go in to bat for his side or
a nice girl go to a dance. Now and then journalists in
search of co^y ask me what is the most thrilling moment
of my ^e. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer
that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe’s
Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now
the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood radng
through my veins. To me reaoing is a rest as to other
people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than
that; it is a necessity, and if I^m deprived of it for a little
while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of
his drug. I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue
than nothing at all. That is putting it too low. I have
spent man) delightful hours poring over the price-list
of the Army and Navy Stores, the lists of second-hand
booksellers and the ABC. All these are redolent of
romance. They are much more entertaining than half
the novels that are written.

I have put books aside only because I was conscious
that time was passing and that it was my business to live.
I hive gone into the world because I thought it was
necessary in order to get the experience without which I
could not write, but I have gone into it also because I
wanted experience for its own sake. It did <iot seem to
me enough only to be a writer. The pattern I had
designed for myself insisted that I should take the
utmost part I could in this fantastic affiiir of being a
man. I desired to feel the common pains and enjoy the
common pleasures that are part of the common human
lot. I saw no reason to subordinate the claims of sense to
the tempting lure of spirit and I was determined to get
whatever fulfilment I could out of social intercourse and
human relations, out of food, drink and fornication,
luxury, sport, art, travel, and as Henry James says,
whatever. But it was an effort and I have always returned
to my books and my own company with relief.

And yet, though I have read so much, 1 am a bad
reader. I read slowly and 1 am a poor skipper. I find it

fi

difficult to leave a book, howevet bad and however much
it botes me, unfinished. I could count on my fingers the
number of books that I have not read from covet to
cover. On the other hand there are few books that
I have read twice. I know very well that there ate
many of which I cannot get the full value on a single
reading, but in that they have given me all I was capable
of getting at the time, and this, though I may forget
their details, remains a permanent enrichment. I know
people who read the same book over and over again. It
can only be that they read with their eyes and not with
their sensibility. It is a {nechanical exercise like the
Tibetan’s turning of a praying-wheel. It is doubtless
a harmless occupation, but they are wrong if they think it
an intelligent one.

z6

IN MY youth, when my instinctive feeling about a book
di&red from that of authoritative critics I did not
hesitate to conclude that I was wrong. I did not know
how often critics accept the conventional view and it
never occurred to me that they could talk with assuitoce
of what they did not know very much about. It was long
before I re^zed that the only thing that mattered to me
in a work of art was what I thought about it. I have
acquired now a certain confidence in my own judgement,
for I have noticed that what I felt instinctively forty years
ago about the writers I read then, and what I would not
heed because it did not agree with current opinion, is
now pretty generally accepted. For all that I still read a
great deal of criticism, for I think it a very agreeable form
of literary composition. One does not always want to be
reading to the profit of one’s soul and there is no
pleasanter way of idling away an hour or two than
reading a volume of criticism. It is diverting to agree; it
is di\crting to differ; and it is always interesting to know
what an intelligent man has to say about some writer,
Henry More, for instance, or Richardson, whom you have
never had occasion to read.

6z

But the only important thing in a book is the mean-
ing it has for you; it may have other and much more pro-
found meanings for the critic, but at second-hand they can
be of small service to you. I do not read a book for the
book’s sake,*but for my own. It is not my business to
judge it, but to absorb what I can of it, as the amoeba
absorbs a particle of a foreign body, and what I cannot
assimilate has nothing to do with me. I am not a scholar,
a student or a critic; I am a professional writer and now
I read only what is useful to md professionally. Anyone
can write a book that will revolutionize the ideas that have
been held for centuries on the Ptolemys and I shall con-
tentedly leave it unread; he* can describe an incredibly
adventurous journey in the heart of Patagonia and I shall
remain ignorant of it. There is no need for the writer
of fictioii tc be an expert on any subject but his own; on
the contrary, it is hurtful to Wm, since, human nature
being weak, he is hard put to it to resist the temptation
of inappositely using his special knowledge. The
novelist is ill-advised to be too technical. The practice,
which came into fashion im the nineties, of using a
multitude of cant terms is tiresome. It should be possible
to give verisimilitude without that, and atmosphere is
dearly bought at the price of tediousness. The novelist
should know something about the great issues that
occupy men, who are his topics, but it Jis generally
enough if he knows a little. He must avoid pedantry at
all costs. But even at that the field is vast and I have tried
to limit m)reelf to such works as were significant to my
purpose. You can never know enough about your
characters. Biographies and reminiscences, technical
works, will give you often an intimate detail, a telling
touch, a revealing hint, that you might never have got
from a living model. People are hard to know. It is a
slow business to induce them to tell you the particular
thing about themselves that can be of use to you. They
have the disadvantage that often you cannot look at them
and put them aside, as you can a book, and you have to
read the whole volume, as it were, only to learn that it
had nothing much to teU you.

O

YOUNG PERSONS, who are anxious to write, s<me*
times pay me the compliment of asking me to tell them of
certain books necessary for them to read. I do. They
seldom read them, for they seem to have little curiosity.
They do not care what their predecessors have done.
They think they know everything that it is necessary to
know of the art of fiction when they have read two or
three novels by Mrs. Woolf, one by E. M. Forster, several
by D. H. Lawrence and, od^ly enough, the Fors3rte Saga.
It is true that contemporary literature has a vividness of
appeal that classical literamre can never have and it is
w^ for a young writer to know what his contem-
poraries are writing about and how. But there are
fashions in literature and it is not easy to tell what
intrinsic value there is in a style of writing that happens
to be the vogue at the moment. An acquaintance with
the great works of the past serves as a very good standard
of comparison. I have sometimes wondered whether it is
due to their ignorance that many young writers, not-
withstanding their facility and cleverness, their sldlful
technique^ so frequently fizzle out. They write two or
three books that are not only brilliant, but mamre, and
then they are done for. But that is not what enriches the
literature of a country. For that you must have writers
who can produce not just two or three books, but a great
body of work. Of course it will be imeven, because so
many fortunate circumstances must go together to pro-
duce a masterpiece; but a masterpiece is more b’kely to
come as the culminating point of a laborious career than as
the lucky fluke of untaught genius. The writer can only
be fertile if he renews himself and he can only renew him-
self if his soul is constantly enriched by fresh experience.
There is no more fruitful source of this than the enchanting
eiqilotation of the great literatures of the past.

For the production of a work of art is not the result
of a miracle. It requires preparation. The soil, be it ever
so rich, must be fed. By taking thought, by deliberate

effort, the artist must enlarge, deepen and diversify his
personality. Then the soil must lie fallow. Like the bride
of Quist, the aijist waits for the illumination that shaJl
bring forth a new spiritual life. He goes about his
ordinary avocations with patience; the subconscious does
its mysterious business; and then, suddenly springing, you
might think from nowhere, the idea is produced. But like
the corn that was sown on stony ground it may easily
wither away; it must be tended with anxious care. All the
power of the artist’s mind must be set to work on it, all lus
technical skill, all his experience, and whatever he has in
of character and individuality, so that with infinite pains
he may present it with the completeness that is fitting to it.

But I am not impatient with the young when, only at
their request, I insist, I advise them to read Shakespeare
and Switt, and they tell me that they read Gulliver’s
Travels in their nursery and Henry IV at school; and
if they find Vanity Fair unendurable and Anna Karenina
footling it is their own affair. '-No reading is worth while
unless you enjoy it. There is at least this to be said for
them that they do not suffer from the self-conceit of
knowledge. They are not withdrawn by a wide culture
froih sympathy with the common run of men who are
after all their material. They are nearer to their fellows
and the art they practise is not a mystery, but a craft on
the same footing as any other. They writ® novels and
plays as unaffectedly as other men build motor-c^s.
This is much to the good. For the artist, the writer
especially, in the solitariness of his own mind constructs
a world that is different from other men’s; the idiosyn-
crasy that makes him a writer separates him from them
and the paradox emerges that though his aim is to
describe them truthfully his gift prevents him from
knowing them as they really are. It is as though he
wanted urgently to see a certain thing and by the act of
looking at it drew before it a veil that obscured it. Ttc
writer stands outside the very action he is engaged in.
He is the comedian who never quite los^s himself in the
part, for he is at the same time spectator and actor. It is
all very well to say that poetry is emotion remembered in

tranquillity; but a poet’s emotion is specific, a poet’s
rather than a man’s, and it is never quite disinterested.
That is why women with their instinctive common sense
have so often found the love of poets unsatisfying. It
may be that the writers of the present d«fy, who seem
to be so much nearer to their raw material, ordinary men
among ordinary men, rather than artists in an alien
crowd, may break down the barrier that their peculiar
gift cannot but raise and so come nearer to the plain
truth than has ever been done before.

28

I HAD my full share of the intellectual’s arrogance and if,
as I hope, I have lost it, I must ascribe it not to my own
virtue or wisdom but to the chance that made me more of
a traveller than most writers. I am attached to England,
but I have never felt myself very much at home there.
I have always been shy with English people. To me
England has been a country where I had obligations that
I did not want to fulfil and responsibilities that irked me.
I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least
the Channel between my native country and me. Some
fortunate persons find freedom in their own minds; I,
with less' spiritual power than they, find it in travel.
While still stf Heidelberg I managed to visit a good many
places in Germany (at Munich I saw Ibsen drinking a
glass of beer at the Maximilianerhof and with a scowl on
his face reading the paper) and I went to Switzerland;
but the first real journey I made was to Italy. I went
primed with much reading of Walter Pater, Ruskin and
John Addington Symonds. I had the six weeks of the
Easter vacation at my disposal and twenty pounds in
my pocket. After going to Genoa and Pisa, where I
trudged the interminable distance to sit for a wh^c on the
pine wood in which Shelley read Sophocles and wrote
verse* on a guitar, I settled down for the inside of a
month in Florence in the house of a widow lady, with
whose daughter I read the Purgatorio, and spent laborious
days, RusUn in hand, visiting the sights. I admired

84

everything that Ruskin told me to admire (even that
horrible tower of Giotto) and turned away in disgust
from what he coc^emned. Never can he have had a more
ardent disciple. After that I went to Venice, Verona and
Milan. I returned to England very mudi pleased with
myself and actively contemptuous of anyone who did
not share my views (and Ruskin’s) of Botticelli and
Bellini. I was twenty.

A year later I went to Italy again, travelling as for
down as Naples, and discovered^Capri. It was the most
enchanting spot I had ever seen and the following
summer I spent the whole of my vacation there. Gipd
was then little known. There was no funicular from
the beach to the town. Few people went there in summer
and you could get board and lodging, with wine included,
and fron. yc ui bedroom window a view of Vesuvius, for
four shillings a day. There was a poet there then, a
Belgian composer, my friend from Heidelberg, Brown,
a painter or two, a sculptor (Harvard Thomas) and an
American colonel who had fought on the southern side
in the Qvil War. I listened with transport to conversa-
tions, up at Anacapri at the colonel’s house, or at
Morgano’s, the wine shop just off the Piazza, when they
talked of art and beauty, literature and Roman history.
I saw two men fly at one another’s throats because they
disagreed over the poetic merit of Heredia’s sormets.
I thought It all grand. Art, art for art’s sake, was the
only thing that mattered in the world; and the artist
alone gave this ridiculous world significance. Politics,
commerce, the learned professions — ^what did they
amount to from the standpoint of the Absolute? They
might disagree, these friends of mine (dead, dead every
jack one of them), about the value of a sonnet or the
excellence of a Greek bas-relief (Greek, my eyel I tell
you it’s a Roman copy and if I tell you a thing it is so);
but they were all agreed about this, that they burned
with a hard, gem-Uke flame. I was too shy to tell
them that 1 iud written a novel and was half-way
through another and it was a great mortification to
me, burning as I was too with a hard, gem-like flame,

(7

to be tteated as a philistine who cared for nothing
but dissecting dead bodies and would seize an
unguarded moment to give his best^iend an enema.

29

PRESENTLY I was qualified. I had already published a
novel and it had had an unexpected success. I thought
my fortune was made, and. abandoning medicine to
become a writer, I went to Spain. I was then twenty-
three. 1 was much more ignorant than are, it seems to
me, young men of that ag^ at the present day. I settled
down in Seville. I grew a moustache, smoked Filipino
cigars, learnt the guitar, bought a broad-brimmed hat
with a dat crown, in whidi I swaggered down the Sietpes,
and hankered for a flowing cape, lined with green and
red velvet. But on account of the expense I did not buy
it. I rode about the countr 3 rside on a horse lent me by a
friend. Life was too pleasant to allow me to give an
undivided attention to literature. My plan was to spend
a year there till 1 had learnt Spanish, then go to Rome
wliich I knew only as a tripper and perfect my superficial
knowledge of Italian, follow that up with a jounlby to
Greece where I intended to learn the vernacular as an
appioach to ancient Greek, and finally go to Cairo and
learn Arabic. It was an ambitious programme, but I am
glad now that I did not carry it out. I duly went to Rome
(where I wrote my first play) but then I went back to
Spain; for something had occurred that I had not
anticipated. I fell in love with Seville and the life one led
there and incidentally with a young thing with green
eyes and a gay smile (but I got over that) and I could not
resist its lure. I returned year after year. I ^yandered
through the white and silent streets and strolled a^ong the
Guadalquivir, I dawdled about the Cathedral, I- went to
bull-fights and made light love to pretty little Cteatures
whose demands on me were no more than my ^guous
means could satisfy. It was heavenly to live in Seville
in the flower of one’s youth. I postponed my education
to a mote convenient moment. The result is that I have

6t

never read the Odyssey but in English and I have never
achieved my ambition to read A Thousand Nights iuid
a Night in ArabiC|

When the intelligentsia took up Russia I, remember*
ing that Cato* had begun to learn Greek when he was
eighty, set about learning Russian, but I had by then lost
my youthful enthusiasm; I never got ferther than being
able to read the plays of Chekov and have long since for-
gotten the little 1 knew. I think now that these schemes of
mine were a trifle nonsensical. Words are not important,
but their meanings, and it is of no spiritual advantage that
I can see to know half a do:^en languages. I have met
polyglots; I have not noticed that they were wiser Aan
the rest of us. It is convenient if you are travelling in a
country to have a sufficient smattering of its speech to
find yout way about and get what you want to eat; and
if it has a considerable literature it is pleasant to be able
to read it. But such a knowledge as tUs can ^acquired
easily. To attempt to learn more is futile. ^'Unless you
devote your whole life to it, you will never learn to speak
the language of another country to perfection; you will
never know its people and its literature with complete
intinfiicy. For they, and the literature which is their
expression, are wrought, not only of the actions they
perform and the words they use, neither of which ofler
great difficulty, but of ancestral instincts,* shades of
feeling that Aey have absorbed with their mothers'
milk, and innate attitudes which the foreigner can never
quite seize. It is hard enough for us to know our own
people; we deceive ourselves, we English especially, if
we think we can know those of other lands. For die sea-
girt isle sets us apart and the link that a common religion
gave, which once mitigated our insularity, was snapped
with the Reformation. It' seems hardly worth while to
take much trouble to acquire a knowledge that can never
be more than superficial. I think then it is merely waste
of time to learn more than a smattering of foreign
tongues. The only excepdon 1 would mi^e to this is
French. For French is the common language of educated
men and it is certainly convenient to speak it well

enough to be able to tteat of any subject of discourse
that may atise. It has a great literature; other countries,
with the exception of England, have g^t writers, rather
than a great literature; and its influence on the rest of the
world has, till the last twenty years, been profound. It
is very well to be able to read French as easily as if it
were your native tongue. There ate limits, however, to
the excellence with which you should allow yourself to
speak it. As a matter of practice it is good to be on your
guard against an Enghshman who speaks French per-
fectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attach^
in the diplomatic service. .

30

I I^AS never stage-struck. I have known dramatists who
wandered in every night to the theatre in which their
play was being acted. They said they did it in order to
see that the cast was not getting slack: I suspect it was
because they could never heat their own words spoken
often enough. Their delight was to sit in a dressing-room
during the intervals and talk over this scene or the other,
wondering why it had fallen flat that night or* con-
gratulating themselves on how well it had gone, and
watch an actor make up. They never ceased to find the
theatrical gossip of the day absorbing. They loved the
theatre and everything connected with it. They had
grease-paint in their bones.

I have never been like that. I like a theatre best when
it is under dust-sheets, the auditorium, in darkness, and
the imset stage, with the flats stacked against the back
wall, is lit only by footlights. I have passed many happy
hours at rdiearsals; I have liked their easy camaraderie,
the hurried lunch at a restaurant round the corner with a
member of the cast and the cup of strong bitter tea, with
thick bread and butter, brought in by the cliarwoman at
fotir o’clock. I have never quite lost that little thrill
of surprised amusement I felt when in my first play I
heard grown men and women re|>eat the lines that ^d
come so easily to my pen. It has interested me to watch

70

the way in which a part grows in the actor’s hands from
the first lifeless reading of the typescript to something
like the charactej that I have seen in my mind’s eye.
I have been ^verted by the important discussions about
the exact place where a piece of furniture should stand,
the self-sufficiency of the director, the tantrums of an
actress displeased with her positions, the artfulness of
old players determined to get the centre of the stage for
their scene, and the desultory talk about any subject that
came to hand. But the consummation is the dress-
rehearsal. There are half a dozen people in the front-row
of the dress-drcle. They are,the dressmakers, subdued
as though they were in church, but very business-like;
they exchange short, sharp whispers with one another
during the performance and make little significant
gestures, you know that they are speakmg of the length
of a skirt, the cut of a sleeve or the feather in a hat; and
the moment the curtain falls, the pins already in their
mouths, they hurry through the door on to the stage.
The director* shouts ‘curtain up’ and when it rises an
actress snatches herself away ftom an agitated colloquy
with two grim ladies in black.

*Oh, Mr, Thing,” she calls out, ‘‘I know that
passementerie is wrong, but Madame Floss says she’ll
take it off and put a bit of lace instead.”

In the stalls are the photographers, the management
and the man from the box-office, the mothers of the
actresses in the cast and the wives of the actors, your own
agent, a girl-friend of yours, and three or four old aaors
who haven’t had a part for twenty years. It is the perfect
audience. After each act the director reads out the
remarks he has jotted down. There is a row with the
electrician who, with nothing to do but attend to his
switches, has turned on the wrong ones; and the author
is indignant with him for being so careless and at the
same time indulgent because he has a notion that the
electrician only forgot his work because he was so

* I use the American votd director rather than the English one,
producer, because I think it letter describes what should be the function
of the person in question.

71

absorbed in the play. Perhaps a little scene is repeated;
then effectiye positions are arranged and with sudden
blares of flash-light photographs are t^en. The curtain
is lowered to set the scene for the next act and the cast
separate to their dressing-rooms to change. The dress-
makers vanish and the old actors slink round the corner
to have a drink. The management despondently smoke
gaspers, the wives and mothers of the cast talk to one
another in undertones and the author's agent reads the
racing news in the evening paper. It is all unreal and
exciting. At last the dressmakers filter through the
fire-proof door and resume their seats, the representa-
tives of rival firms at a haughty distance from one
another, and the stage-manager puts his head round the
curtain.

‘*A11 ready, Mr. Thing,” he says.

"All right. Fire away. Curtain up.”

But the dress-rehearsal was the last pleasure my play
ever had to give me. At the first nights of my early plays
I was on tenterhooks, for on their result my future
depended. When Lady Frederick was produced I had
reached the end of the Uttle money I had come into when
I was twenty-one, my novels did not bring me in eiiough
to live upon, and I could earn nothing by journalism. I
had been "given a little reviewing now and Aen and once
persuaded ^n editor to let me do the notice of a play, but
I evidently had no gifts in that direction; indeed, the
editor in question told me that I had no sense of the
theatre. If Lady Frederick was a failure it seemed to me
that there was nothing for me but to go back to the
hospital for a year to refresh my knowledge of medicine
and then get a post as surgeon on a ship. At that time
this was a position not much sought after and few men
with London degrees applied for it. Later, wjicn I had
become a successful dramatist, I went to first nights with
my senses alert to discern from the reactions of the public
whether there was any falling off in my ability. I did my
best to lose myself in the audience. For the audience a
first night is a more or less interesting event which they
take between a snack at seven-thirty and supper at eleven,

72

and the success or failure of which is no great matter. I
tried to go to my own first nights as though they were
somebody else’s; but even at that I found it a disagreeable
experience. It ditt me no good to hear the laughter that
rewarded a happj jest or the applause that broke out on
the fall of the curtain when an act had pleased. The fact
is that, even in my lightest pieces, I had put in so much
of myself that I was embarrassed to hear it disclosed to a
crowd of people. Because they were words I had written
myself they had for me an intiriacy that I shrank from
sharing with aU and sundry. This unreasonable feeling
I have had even when I have gone to see a play of mine
in a translation and have sat in the theatre as an entirely
unknown member of the public. Indeed I should never
have gone to see my plays at all, on the first night or any
other, I had not thought it necessary to see the effect
they had on the audience in order to learn how to write
them.

THE ACTOR^S calling is a hard one. I am not speaking
now. of the young women who go on the stage because
they have a pretty face and if good looks were a qualifica-
tion for typists might just as well have gone into an office,
or of the young men who do so because they have a good
figure and no particular aptitude for anything else. They
drift in and out of the profession; the women marry and
the men get into a wine-mcrchant^s office or take up
interior decoration. I am speaking of the actors by
vocation. They have a natural gift and the desire to use
it. It is a profession that requires assiduous labour to
achieve proficiency, so that by the time an actor knows
how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any
but a few; it requires boundless patience; it is fraught
with disappointments. Long stretches of enforced idle-
ness must be endured. The prizes are few and can be
held but for a brief period. The rewards are inadequate.
The actor is at the mercy of fortune and the inconstant
favour of the public. He is forgotten as soon as he

7J

Tuie SUMMINO U?. F

ceases to please. Then it will avail him nothing to have
been the idol of the crowd. Me can starve for all they
care. It is when I think of this that I find it easy to be
indulgent to the actor’s airs and gr&es, his exigence
and vanity, when he is on the crest of fjie wave. Let him
be flamboyant and absurd if he likes. It all lasts such a
little while. And after all his egotism is part of his
talent.

There was a period when the stage was the doorway
to romance and everyone connected with it seemed
exciting and mysterious. In the civilized world of the
eighteenth century the actors gave life a touch of fantasy.
Their disorderly existence \vas a lure to the imagination
in the Age of Reason and the heroic parts they played,
the verse they spoke, invested them with a halo. In
Goethe’s Wilhelm Mcister, that wonderful and neglected
book, you can see with what tenderness the poet regarded
what can have been nothing but a second-rate touring
company. And in the nineteenth century the actors
offered an escape from the respectability of an industrial
era. The bohemianism th^t was ascribed to them excited
the imagination of young men who were forced to
earn their living in an office. They were extravagant
persons in a sober world, thoughtless in a careful one,
and fancy clothed them with glamour. There is in
Victor Hugo’s Qioses Vues a passage, touching in its
unconscious humour, in which with awe, astonishment
and a spark of envy for such wildness, the sensible little
man describes a supper party with an actress. For once
in his life he felt a devil of a fellow. Good gracious,
how the champagne flowed and what luxury, wlmt silver,
what tiger-skins, were to be seen in her apartment!

TWs glory has vanished. The actors have become
settled, respectable and well-to-do. It offended .them to
be thought a race apart and they have done thei^ best to
be like everybody else. They' have shown themfelves to
us without their make-up in the broad light of day, and
besought us to see for ourselves that they are golfers and
tax-payers and thinking men and women. To my mind
this is all stuff and nonsense.

74

I have known a number of actors very well. I have
found them good company. Their gift of mimicry, their
knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them
often highly entirtaiiiing. They are generous, kindly
and courageoVis. IBut I have never quite been able to
look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded
in aclueving any intimacy with them. They are like
crossword puzzles in which there are no words to fit the
clues. The fact is, I suppose, that their personality is
made up of the parts they play and that the basis of it is
sometliing amorphous. It is a soft, malleable thing that
IS capable of talang any shape and being painted in any
colour. An ingenious writer has suggested that it is
not surprising if for so long they were refused burial
in consecrated ground because it is preposterous to
suppose tlut they have souls. This is probably an
extravagance. They are certainly very interesting. And
the novelist, if he is sincere, cannot but acknowledge that
there is between him and them a certain affinity: their
character, like his, is a harmony that is none too plausible;
they are all the persons they mirror, while he is all
the persons he can beget. The writer and the actor
represent emotions they do not, at the moment at all
events, feel; and standing with one side of themselves
outside life portray it for the satisfaction of their creative
instincts. Make-believe is their reality, and J:he public,
which is at once their material and their judge, is also
their dupe. Beeause makc-belicve is their reality they can
look upon reality as make-believe.

52

/ BEGAN to write plays, as do most young writers, I
expect, because it seemed less difiicult to set down on
paper the things people said than to construct a narrative.
Dr. Johnson remarked long ago that it is much mote easy
to form dialogues than to contrive adventures. Looking
through the old note-books in which from eighteen to
twenty I wrote down scenes for the plays I had in mind
I find the dialogue on the whole easy and probable. The

7/

jokes no longet make me smile, but they ate said in the
words people would have used then. I caught the
colloquial note by instinct. But the jokes are few and
savage. The themes of my plays wer^ombre; and they
ended in gloom, despair and death. On my first journey
to Florence, I took Ghosts with me, and by way of relasa-
tion, for I was seriously studying Dante, translated it into
English from a German version in order to acquire a
knowledge of technique. I remember that with all my
admiration for Ibsen T could not help thinking Pastor
Manders a bit of a bote. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was
then running at the St. James’s Theatre.

During the next two or three years I finished several
curtain-raisers and sent them to various managers. One
or two were never returned and since I had no copies were
lost; the others I got discouraged over and put away or
destroyed. At that time, and for long after, it was
much more diHicult than it is now for an unknown
playwright to get a production. Runs were long, for
expenses were small, and a small band of authors, headed
by Pinero and Henry Aflthur Jones, could be counted
upon to provide the principal theatres with a play when-
ever one was needed. The French stage was still flourish-
ing and adaptations from the French in bowdlerized
versions were popular. I got it into my head, I think from
the fact that ^orge Moore’s Strike at Arlingford was
done by the Independent Theatre, that my only chance of
being acted was by making a reputation for myself as a
novelist. So I put the drama aside and set myself to
writing fiction. The reader may think that this methodical
fashion of going to work was unbecomingly business-
like in a young author. It suggests a matter of feet turn
of mind rather than a heaven-sent compulsion to enrich
the world with works of art. When I had published a
couple of novels and had a volume of short stories ready
for the press, I sat down and wrote my first full-length
play. J* was called A Man of Honour. I sent it to Forbes
Robertson, who was then a popular actor, with the
reputation of having artistic inclinations, and when he
returned it to me after three or four months, to Charles

7 ^

Frohman. He also returned it. I rewrote it and at last,
having by then published two more novels, one of which
(Mrs. Craddock) had a considerable success, so that I was
beginning to be looked upon as a serious and promising
novelist, I sent iqto the Stage Society. They accepted it
and W. L. Courtney, a member of the committee, liked
it well enough to print it in the Fortnightly Review. He
had only published one play before, Mrs. Clifford’s The
Likeness of the Night, so that it was a great honour.

Since the Stage Society WaS at that time the only
organiaation of its kind, its productions attracted a good
d^ of attention and my play was treated by the critics as
seriously as though it had been put on for a run in an
important theatre. The old hacks, with Clement Scott at
their head, abused it soundly; the critic of The Sunday
Times siatol diit it showed no sign of any talent for the
stage. I have forgotten who he was. But the critics who
had succumbed to the influence of Ibsen treated it as a
work worthy of consideration. They were sympathetic
and encouraging.

I thought 1 had taken such a step forward that my
course from then on would offer no great difficulties. It
did not take m«. long to discover that, beyond learning a
good deal about the technique of pla3nvriting, I had
achieved nothing. After its two performances my
play was dead. My name was known to th^ small body
of people who were interested in the experimental theatre
and if I had written suitable plays I have no doubt that
the Stage Society would have performed them. But that
seemed to me unsatisfactory. Ehiring the rehearsals I
had come in contact with the people who were interested
in the Society and especially with Granville Barker, who
played the leading part in my play. The attitude I found
there was antagonistic to me. It seemed to me patronizing
and narrow. Granville Barker was very young; I was
only twenty-eight, and he, I think, was a year younger.
He had charm and gaiety and a coltish grace. He was
brimming over with other people’s id< is. But I felt in
him a feat of life which he sought to cheat by contempt
of the common herd. It was difficult to find an3rthing he

77

did not despise. He lacked spiritual vitality. I riiought
.riut an artist needed more force, more ^o, more blunt-
ness, more guts, more beef. He had wririen a play. The
Marriage of Ann Leete, which seemed to me ansemic and
affected. 1 liked life and wanted to %ijoy it. I wanted
to get all I possibly could out of it. I was not satisfied
wim the appreciation of a small band of intellectuals.
I had my doubts about their quality, for I had been to
a stupid and rather common little farce that the Stage
Society had unaccourtably given and had seen its
members consumed with laughter. I was not at all cer-
tain that there was not a great deal of pose in their
concern for the higher drama. I wanted no such audience
as this, but the great public. Moreover I was poor. I
had no notion of living on a crust in a garret if I could
help it. I had found out that money was like a sixth
sense without which you could not make the most of
the other five.

During the rehearsals of A Man of Honour I had dis-
covered that some scenes of flirtatious badinage in the
first act were amusing ancj I decided that I could write a
comedy. I made up my mind to write one now. I called
it Loaves and Fishes. Its hero was a worldly, ambitious
parson and the story dealt with his courtship of a rich
widow, his intrigues to get a bishopric and his final
capture of a pretty heiress. No manager would consider
it; it was 'thought impossible that a play that held a
clergyman up to ridicule would be tolerated. I came to
the conclusion then that my best chance was to write a
comedy with a big part for an actress, who, if she liked
it, might induce a manager to give the play a trial. I
asked myself what sort of part would be hkely to appeal
to a leading lady, and having made up my mind on this
point, wrote Lady Frederick. But its most effective
scene, the scene that afterwards made it so successful,
was one in which the heroine in order to disijUusion a
young lover let him come into her dressing-room and
discover her without any make-up on her face and with
her hair dishevelled. At that distant time make-up was
not universal and most women wore false hair. But no

7 ^

actress would consent to let an audience see her in this
condition and manager after manager refused it. I made
up my mind then to devise a play in which no one could
find anything to Object to. I wrote Mrs. Dot. It suffered
the same fate as|the others. The managers thought it
too slight. They complained that there was not enough
action and Miss Mary Moore, then a popular actress,
suggested that I should insert a burglary to make it more
exciting. I began to think that I should never be able to
write a piece that a leading lady liked well enough to
insist on playing and so tried my hand at a man's play.
I wrote Jack Straw.

I had been under the impression that the small
success I had had with the Stage Society would impress
managers in my favour. To my mortification I found that
this waji lu L :>o. In fact my connection with that body
prejudiced me with them, for they decided that I could
only write gloomy and unprofitable plays. They could
not say that my comedies were gloomy; but they felt them
vaguely unpleasant and were convinced that they were
uncommercial. I should ccEtainly have given up in
despair the attempt to get acted, for one rejection of a
manuscript haj> always discouraged me; but fortunately
for me Golding Bright thought that my plays were
marketable and took them in hand. He submitted them
to manager after manager and at last, in i907.^whcn I had
written six full-length pieces, after ten years' waiting.
Lady Frederick was produced at the Court Theatre.
Three months later Mrs. Dot was being played at the
Comedy and jack Straw at the Vaudeville. In June
Lewis Waller put on at the I^yric a play called The
Explorer which I had written immediately after The Man
of Honour. I had achieved what I wanted.

THE FIRST three had long runs. The Explorer was only
just not a failure. I did not make a gtc it deal of money,
for in those days the takings of a popular play were muw
less than they arc now, and my royalties were small, but

79

I was at all events relieved from financial anxiety and my
future seemed sure. The fact that I had four plays run-
ning at once brought me great notoriety and Bernard
Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch which William
Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the
boards that advertised my plays. I was much photo-
graphed and much interviewed. Distinguished people
sought my acquaintance. My success was spectacidar
and unexpected. I was more relieved than excited. I
think I lack the quality of being surprised, and just as in
my journeys I have accepted the most curious sights and
the most novel circumstances as perfectly ordinary, so
that I have had to force myself to notice that they were
remarkable, so now I took all this to-do as natural. One
evening when I was dining alone at my club a fellow-
member, but a stranger to me, was entertaining a guest
at the next table to mine; they were going to one of my
plays and began to talk of me. The stranger mentioned
that I was a member of the club, whereupon his guest
said:

“D’you know him at all? I suppose he^s about as
swollen-headed as he can be.^"

“Oh, yes, 1 know him well,*^ answered my fellow
member. “He can’t get a hat big enough to lit him.”

He did me an injustice. I took the success as my due.
I was amused at my notoriety, but not impressed by it.
The only definite reaction that I can recall of that period
was a reflection that occurred to me when I was walking
along Panton Street one evening. Passing the Comedy
Theatre I happened to look up and saw the clouds lit by
the setting sun. I paused to look at the lovely sight and
I thought to myself: Thank God, I can look at a sunset
now without having to think how to describe it. I
meant then never to write another book, but to devote
myself for the rest of my life to the drama.

Though the public accepted my plays Xvith en-
thusiasm, not only in England and America, but on the
Continent, critical opinion was by no means unanimous.
The more popular organs praised their wit, gaiety and
theatrical effectiveness, but found fault with their cynicism;

fo

the more serious critics, on the other hand, fell very foul
of them. They found them cheap and trivial. They told
me that I had sold my soul to mammon; and the intelli-
gentsia, of whi<iK I had been a modest, but respected
member, not ony turned a cold shoulder on me, that
would have been bad enough, but flung me, like Ludfer,
headlong into the bottomless pit. I was taken aback
and a trifle mortified, but I bore my disgrace with forti-
tude, for I knew it was not the end of die story. I had
desired a certain end and had taken what I thought were
the only possible means to attain it; I could oifly shrug
my shoulders if there were people so stupid as not to see
that. If I had continued to write plays as bitter as A Man
of Honour or as sardonic as Loaves and Fishes I should
never hav<* been given the opportunity of producing cer-
tain pieces to wiuch not even the most severe have refused
praise. The critics accused me of writing down to the
public; I did not exactly do that; I had then very high
spirits, a facility for amusing dialogue, an eye for a
comic situation and a flippant gaiety; there was more in
me than that, but this I pux away for the time, and
wrote my comedies with those sides of myself only that
wer? useful to my purpose. They were designed to
please and they achieved their aim.

I had no intention of fizzUng out with a passing
success and I wrote my next two plays to coasolidate my
hold on the public. They were a little bolder and, mild
and unsophisticated as they must seem now, they were
attacked by the more strait-laced for their indecency. One
of them, Penelope, must have had some merit, for when it
was revived in Berlin twenty years later it filled the theatre
for a whole season.

I had by now learnt all that I was ever able to learn of
the technique of the drama, and with the exception of
The Explorer, which for a reason I saw very clearly had
failed to please so well, I had had an uninterrupted series
of successes. 1 thought it time to tty my hand at more
serious work. I wanted to see what 1 could do with
more complicated subjects, I wanted to make one or
two small technical experiments which I thought would

ti

be theatdcally ettective, and I wanted to see how far I
could go with the public. 1 wrote The Tenth Man and
Landed Gentry, and finally, after it had been lying in my
desk a dozen years, produced Loaves ani Fishes. None of
them was a failure; none of them wap a success. The
managers neither made nor lost money on them. Loaves
and Fishes failed to have a long run because the public of
that day was uneasy at seeing a clergyman made fun of.
The play is written somewhat extravagandy, so that it
suggests farce rather than comedy, but it has some
amusing scenes in it. The others fell between two stools.
One portrayed the narrow, hide-bound life of country
gendefolk; the other, the political and financial world;
with both of which I had some acquaintance. I knew that
I must interest, move and amuse, and I heightened the
note. They were neither frankly realistic nor frankly
theatrical. My indecision was fatal. The audiences found
them rather disagreeable and not quite ,teal. Then I took a
rest for two years and at the end of it wrote The Land of
Promise. This had been played to crowded houses for
some months when the war broke out. I had produced
ten plays in seven years. The intelligentsia, having passed
judgement, ignored me, but I was securely fixed in the
public favour.

34

FROM TIME to time I had a good deal of leisure during
the war; at first because the work I was doing took up but
part of my day and to write plays was a convenient
means of ^stracting attention from the activities I was
engaged in; and later, when, having contracted tuber-
culosis, I had to lie long in bed, because it was a pleasant
way of passing the time. I wrote a series of playi in quick
succession. It began with Out Betters, which was written
in 1915, and ended with The Constant Wife, vdiich was
written in 1927.

Most of these plays were comedies. They ate written
in the tradition which fiourished so brightly in the
Restoration Period, which was carried on by Goldsmith

t»

and Sheridan, and which, since it has had so long a vogue,
may be supposed to have something in it that peculiarly
appeals to me English temper. The people who do not
like it describe i4 as artificial comedy and by the epithet
foolishly think t^ey condemn it. It is drama not of
action, but of conversation. It treats with indulgent
cynicism the humours, follies and vices of the world of
fashion. It is urbane, sentimental at times, for that is
in the English character, and a trifie unreal. It does not
preach: sometimes it draws a moral, but with a shrug of
the shoulders as if to invite you to lay no too great stress
on it. When the busy Monsieur de Voltaire went to see
Congreve to discuss the current drama with him, Mr.
Congreve pointed out to him that he was a gentleman
rather than a dramatist. The interviewer answered: Tf
you wetv. x.osliing but a gentleman 1 should not have
troubled to call upon you.’ Monsieur de Voltaire was
certainly the wittiest man of his age, but here he showed
want of intelligence. Mr. Congreve’s remark was pro-
found. It showed that he knew very well that the first
person the author of comedy must consider from the
standpoint of comedy is himself.

I HAD by then made up my mind on many things con-
nected with the drama.

One of the conclusions I had come to was that a
prose play was scarcely less ephemeral than a news sheet.
The pkywright and the journalist need very similar gifts,
a quick eye for a good story and a telling point, animation
and a vivid way of writing. All the dramatist needs
besides is a specific knack. I do not know that anyone
has been able to discover what this knack consists of.
It cannot be learnt. It can exist without education or
culttire. It is a faculty that enables the playwright so to
put words that they carry across the footlights and to
tell a story, as it were stereoscopically, so that it visibly
moves before an audience. It is a very rare finculty: that is
why dramatists are so much more highly paid than other

atdsts. If has nothing to do with litetaiy ability as we
know from the £u:t that the most distinguished novelists
have generally failed lamentably when they have tried to
write plays. It is a faculty, like that of fteing able to play
by ear, of no spiritual importance. But Adthout it, though
your ideas may be profound, your theme original and your
characterisation acute, you will never be able to write a
play.

A good deal has been written about the technique of
play-writing. I have read most of the books on the sub-
ject with interest. The best way of learning how to write
a play is to see one of your own produced. That will
teach you how to write lines that the actors find easy to
say and, if you have an ear, how far you can carry the
rhythm of a sentence without losing the spontaneity of
conversation. It will show you what sort of speech and
what sort of scene are effective. But I think the secret of
play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the
point and whenever you can, cut. The first of these
demands a logical mind. Few of us have it. One idea
suggests another; it is vay pleasant to pursue it, even
though it is not directly concerned with the subject. The
inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must
avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid
sin, for sin may be venial, digression is mortal. The
principle is^that of direction of interest. It is important in
a novel too, but here greater space permits of greater
latitude and, just as according to the idealists evil is
transformed into the perfect good of the Absolute, so
certain digressions may take their necessary part in the
development of the main theme. (A very good example
of this is the early history of the Elder Zossima in the
Brothers Karamazov.) Perhaps I should explain what I
mean by direction of interest. It is the method by which
an author causes you to concern yourself with the for-
tunes of certain people under certain conditions and keeps
you attached to them till he has reached his solution. If
he lets you wander from the main point it is very likely
that he will never recapture your attention. It is a
psychological trait in human nature that interest is estab-

*4

lished in the persons whom the playwright introduces at
the beginning of his play so firmly that if the interest is
then switched off to other persons who enter upon the
scene later, a sensfe of disappointment ensues. The astute
dramatist presenti| his subject as early as possible, and if
for theatrical effectiveness he does not introduce his
principal characters till later, the conversation of the
persons on the stage at the rising of the curtain con-
centrates the attention of the audience on them so that
the delay in their appearance inaeases the expectation.
No one followed this practice more scrupulously than
that vety competent dramatist William Shakespeare.

It is the dkliculty of directing the interest that makes
it so hard to write the plays that are known as plays of
atmosphere. The best known of them, of course, are
Chekov*i. isiitce the interest is not concentrated on two
or three persons, but on a group, and since the theme is
their relations with one another and the environment,
the author must take care to counteract the natural
inclination of the audience to concern themselves with
one character or two more than with the test. With the
interest thus dispersed it is possible that the audience will
not feel warmly about any of the persons of the play, and
since the author must beware that none of his threads is
more important than the other, and thus attracts more
vividly the attention of the audience, every incident must
be subdued to the minor key. So it is very difficult to
prevent the audience from feeling a certain monotony and
because nothing, either incident or character, has been
very forcibly impressed upon them they are very likely to
take away with them, when the play is over, some con-
fusion of spirit. In practice it has been shown that sudi
plays are only tolerable when they are perfectly acted.

Now I come to my second maxim. However bril-
liant a scene may be, however witty a hne or profound a
reflection, if it is not essential to his play the dramatist
must cut it. Here it may serve him if he is also a man of
letters. The pure dramatist looks upon it as something of
a miracle that he should be able to put words on paper at
all. and when they are there, out of his own brain, if not

straight from heaven, he looks upon them as sacred. He
cannot beat to sacrifice one of them. I well remember
Henry Arthur Jones showing me one of his manuscripts
and my surprise on noticing that he hsld written such a
simple sentence as, will you have sugar in your tea? in
three different ways. It is no wonder that people to whom
words come so reluctantly should attach an inordinate
importance to them. The man of letters is accustomed to
writing; he has learnt how to express himself without
intolerable labour and so can cut with fortitude. Of
course every writer hits now and then upon a thought
that seems to him so happy, a repartee that amuses him so
much, that to cut it is worse than having a tooth out: it
is then that it is well to have engraved on his heart the
maxim, if you can, cut.

To do so is now more than ever necessary, for audi-
ences ate at once quicker-witted and more impatient than
ever before in the history of the theatsc. Plays have been
written in such and such a way because they satisfied
audiences. Audiences in the past seem to have been
willing to sit out scenes that were elaborately developed
and to listen to speeches in which the characters fully
explained themselves. It is very different now, add the
difference Im been occasioned, I suppose, by the advent
of the cinema. To-day, audiences, especially in English-
speaking countries, have learnt to see the point of a scene
at once and having seen it want to pass on to the next;
they catch the gist of a speech in a few words and having
caught it, their attention quickly wanders. The author
must curb his natural desire to get the full value out of a
scene or to let his characters display themselves in ample
expression. Indications are enough. They will be seized.
His dialogue must be a sort of spoken shorthand. He
must cut and cut till he has arrived at die maximum of
concentradon.

^6

A PLAY is the result of a coUaboradon between the
author, the actors, the audience, and, I suppose one must

tt

add now, the director. For the moment I will consider
the audience. All the best dramatists have written with
their eye on it and thotigh they have more often spoken of
it with contempt Hhan with ^ood will they have known
that they were deppident on it. ''It is the public that pa3rs,
and if it is not {ueased with the entertainment that is
offered it, stays away. A play docs not exist without an
audience. Indeed the de^tion of a play is a piece of
writing in dialogue devised to be spoken by actors and
heard by an indeiinite number of persons. A play
written to be read in the study is a form of the novel in
dialogue in which the author for some reason of his own
(obscure to most of us) has eschewed the ordinary advan-
tages of narrative. A play that does not appe^ to an
audience may have merits, but it is no more a play than a
mule is a ht>i (Alas, all of us dramatists from time to
time give birth to these unsatisfactory hybrids.) Everyone
who has had to do yith the theatre knows how strangely
audiences affect plays; a malinfe audience and an evening
audience may see quite different plays. We arc told that
the Norwegian public looks •upon Ibsen’s plays as
comedies ridi in laughter; the English public has never
seen anything to laugh at in those passing dramas. The
emotion of die audience, its interest, its laughter, are part
of the action of the play. It creates it in the same way as
we through our senses fro^n the objective data«create the
beauty of the sunrise and the peace of the sea. The
audience is not the least important actor in the play and
if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.
The dramatist then is in the position of a tenais player
who is left on the court with nobody to play with.

Now the audience is a very curious animal. It is
shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less
than that of its most intellectual members. If these were
graded from A to Z, decreasing with succeeding letters to
the aero of the hysterical shop-girl, I should say its mental
capacity would come round about the letter O. It is
immensely suggestible; individuals will laugh at a joke
they have not seen because others who see it do. It
is emotional; but it instinctively resents having its

>7

emotions stirred and is always ready to escape with a
giggle. It is sentimental; but will only accept senti-
mentality of its own brand: thus in England it will acc<M
the emotions attached to the concept bf home, but the
concept of a son’s love for his moth|r only excites its
ridicule. It is careless of probability if the situation
excites its interest, a trait of which Shakespeare made
extravagant use; but jibs at a lack of plausibiUty. Indivi-
duals know that they constantly give way to impulse,
but an audience insists*^ that every action must have its
cogent reason. Its morality is the average morality of the
crowd and it will be sincerely shocked by a sentiment that
will offend none of its members taken one by one. It does
not think with its brain, but with its solar plexus. It is
easily bored. It likes novelty, but a novelty that will fit in
with old notions, so that it excites but does not alarm. It
likes ideas, so long as they are put in dramatic form, only
they must be ideas that it has itself had, but for want
of courage has never expressed. It will not play if it is
hurt or affronted. Its chief desire is to be assured that the
make-believe is real. •

In essentials audiences never change, but at different
periods and in different countries at the same period they
rise to different levels of sophistication. The drama
pictures the manners and customs of the day, and in its
turn affects them, and as these change minor changes
follow both in the trappings of a play and in its themes.
The invention of the telephone, for instance, has made
many scenes redundant, has quickened the pace of plays
and has made it possible to avoid certain improbabilities.
Probability is a variable factor. It is merely what the
audience is prepared to accept. Often there is no rhyme
nor reason for this. People leave compromising letters
about or accidentally hear things they are not supposed
to hear as often as they did in Elizabethan tinges and it
is merely a convention that rejects such inetdents as
improbable. But what is more important is tjut there
has been a change of heart among us, owing to changes
in civilisation, and so certain themes that dramatists
favoured have now fallen into desuetude. We are less

St

revengeful than we were and now a play devoted to
revenge would be scarcely plausible. Perhaps because
our passions are less strong, perhaps even because the
teaching of Christ has at last penetrated our thick heads,
we look upon revenge as discreditable. I ventured once
to suggest that thl liberation of women and their new-
won sexual freedom had so altered men’s views on
the importance of chastity that jealousy was no longer a
theme for tragedy, but only for comedy; but this observa-
tion was received with so much indignation that I will
not enlarge upon it.

57

I Hj4VE given this little analysis of an audience because
he nature (S t-be audience is for the dramatist the most
important of the conventions within which he must work.
Every artist must accept the conventions of the art which
he pursues, but it m!iy be that these are of such a nature as
to make the art a minor one. It was a poetic convention
in the eighteenth century that qpthusiasm was objection-
able and that imagination must be curbed by reasonable-
ness; so it was only minor poetry that was produced.
Now, the fact that the general mentality of an audience is
so very much lower than that of its more intellectual
members is a factor that the author must deal with. I
think it definitely reduces prose drama to a minor place.
It has been noticed over and over again that, intellectually,
the theatre is thirty years behind the times, and the intelli-
gent owing to its poverty of thought have largely ceased
to frequent it. I have a notion that when the intelligent
look for thought in a playhouse, they show less intelli-
gence than one would have expected of them. Thought is
a private thing. It is the offspring of reason. It depends
on the qpental capacity of the individual and on his educa-
tion. Its communication is private from the mind that
conceives it to the mind that is prepared to receive it, and
if one man’s meat is another man’s poison, still more is
one man’s thought another man’s truism. But an audi-
ence is affected by mass suggestion and mass suggestion is

The surtMiM. ip

excited by emotion. I have hazarded the opinion that if
you classified the members of an audience from A to Z,
starting, say, with the critic of The Times and ending with
the girl who sells sweet-stuffs in a shop off the Tottenham
G>urt Road, its mental capacity would stand about the
letter O. How can you write a play 'of which the ideas
are so significant that they will make the critic of The
Times sit up in his stall and at the same time induce
the shop-girl in the gallery to forget the young man who
is holding her hand? The only ideas that can affect them
when they are welded together in that unity which is an
audience, are those commonplace, fundamental ideas that
are almost feelings. These, the root ideas of poetry, are
love, death and the destiny of man. It is not any sort of
dramatist who can find anything to say about them
that has not been said a thousand times already; the
great truths are too important to be new.

Besides, ideas do not grow on a gooseberry bush and
few people in a generation can devise new ones. It is very
unlikely that the dramatist who is lucky enough to have
been born with the faculty of putting tWngs so that they
carry across the footlights will also be an original
thinker. He would not be a dramatist if his mind did not
work in the concrete. 1 Ic has a quick eye for the instance;
there is ho reason to expect that he will have a faculty for
conceptual thinking. He may have a meditative cast of
mind and be interested in the speculations of his time, but
there is a long way between this and having the power of
creative thought. It might be very well if dramatists were
philosophers, but in point of fact they are as little likely to
be so as ate kings. “The only two dramatists in our time
who have made their mark as thinkers are Ibsen and
Shaw. Both were fortunate in the time of their appear-
ance. Ibsen’s advent coincided with the movement for
the liberation of women from the inferior position in
which they had so long stood; Shaw’s with t$e revolt of
youth from the conventionality of the Vietdrian epoch
and the trammels that age had set upon it. They had to
their hands subjects new to the theatre that could be dis-
played with dramatic efiectiveness. Shaw had the advan-
ce

tage, useful to any di^atist, of high spirits, rollicking
humour, wit and fertility of comic invention. Ibsen as we
know had a meagre power of invention; his characters
under different names are very dully repeated and his
intrigue from plav to play is little varied. It is not a gross
exaggeration to s*y that his only gambit is the sudden
arrival of a stranger who comes into a study room and
op^s the windows; whereupon the people who were
sitting there catch their death of cold and everything ends
unhappily. When you consider the mental content of
what these authors had to offer, you can, unless you are
but ill educated, hardly fail to see that it consisted of no
more than the common culture of the day. Shaw’s ideas
were expressed with great vivacity. They could only have
surprised because the intellectual capacity of the audience
was incon^i i^rable. They surprise no longer; indeed,
the young tend to look on them now as antiquated
buffooneries. The disadvantage of ideas in the theatre is
that if they are acceptable, they are accepted and so kill
the play that helped to diffuse them. For nothing is so
tiresome in the theatre as to jje forced to listen to the
exposition of ideas that you are willing to take for granted.
Now that everyone admits the right of a woman to her
own personality it is impossible to listen to A Doll’s
House without impatience. The dramatist of ideas loads
the dice against himself. Plays are ephemeral enough in
any case, because they must be dressed in the* fashion of
the moment and fashions change so that they lose the
actuality which is one of their attractive features; it seems
a pity to make them more ephemeral still by founding
them on ideas that will be stale the day after to-morrow.
When I say that plays are ephemeral, I am of course not
speaking of plays in verse; the greatest and noblest of the
arts can lend its own life to riie humble partner; I am
speaking of the plays in prose with which our modem
theatre is alone occupied. I can think of no serious prose
play that has survived the generation that gave it birth.
A few OMnedies have haphazardly traveUed down a
couple of centuries or so. They arc revived now and then
because a famous part tempts a leading actor, or a

ft

manager in want of a stop-gap thinks he will put on a
play on which he has no royalties to pay. 'Iliey are
museum pieces. The audience laughs at their wit with
politeness and at their farce with embarrassment. They
ate not held not taken out of themscjves. They cannot
believe and so ate never caught by the illusion of the
theatre.

But if a play is naturally ephemeral why, the dramatist
may ask, should he not look upon himself as a journalist,
a journalist of the better class who writes for the sixpenny
weeklies, and produce plays on the current topics, politi-
cal and social, of the day? His ideas will be neither more
nor less original than those of the serious young men
who write in these journals. There is no reason why
they should be less interesting; and if by the time the play
has run its course they are out of date, what of it? The
play is dead anyway. Now to this question the answer is
that there is no reason at all, if he can get away with it and
if he thinks it worth while. But he must be warned that
he will get little thanks from the critics. For though
they clamour for the play .of ideas, when he presents it to
them they sniff at it if the ideas are familiar to them,
thinking modestly that what they know already is
commonplace, and if the ideas are unfamiliar to them,
they think'them perfect nonsense and come down on him
like a thousand of bricks. Even the licensed Shaw has
not escaped the horns of this dilemma.

Societies have been founded in order to produce
plays that people may go to who disdain the commercial
theatre. They languish. The intelligentsia cannot be per-
suaded to patronise these performances, and if they do,
want to go without paying. There are a number of
dramatists who spend their whole careers writing plays
which are only produced by these societies. They are
trying to do something for which the drama is iinsuited;
once they have got a number of persons into the play-
house, these become an audience, and then, evep though
their average mentality is higher than the ordinary, they
ate subject to the reactions by which an audience is
governed. They are swayed by emotion rather than by

9 *

reasoning. They demand action rather than debate. (By
action of course I do not mean merely physical action:
from the standpoint of the theatre a character who says, I
have a headache, performs an action as much as one who
falls off a steeple^ When the plays these authors write
fail, they claim it Is because audiences have not the sense
to appreciate them. I do not think they ate right. Their
plays fail because they have no dramatic value. Let no one
think that commercial plays succeed because they are bad
plays. The story they tell may be hackneyed, the dialogue
commonplace and the characterisation ordinary, they
succeed notwithstanding because they have the essential,
though doubtless trivial, merit of holding their audiences
by the specific appeal of drama. But that this need not be
the only merit of the commercial play is shown by
those of Lojj-*. il'* Vega, Shakespeare and Molifere.

IF I have thus enlarged on the play of ideas, it is because
I think the demand for it is responsible for the lamentable
decadence of our theatre. The critics clamour for them.
Now,* the critics are of necessity the worst judges of
plays. For consider, the play appeals to the audience
as a unity, the current that passes infectiously from
one person to another is essential to the diyimatist; he
wants to excite a contagion; he must take people out of
themselves so that they become an instrument for him to
play on, and what they give back, the resonance, the
tone, the emotion, is part of his play. But the critic is
there not to feel but to judge. He must hold aloof from
the contagion that has captured the group and keep his
selfpossession. He must not allow his heart to carry him
away; his head must remain well screwed on his shoulders.
He must take care not to become part of the audience.
He is not there to play his part in the play, but to watch
it from the outside. The result is that he does not see
the play they see because he has not, as they have, acted
in it. It is natural enough then that he should ask for
different things in a play from those the audience asks for.

93

There is no reason why he should get it. Plays are not
written for critics. Or at least, they should not be. But
^la5rw£ights are sensitive creatures, and when they are
told that the plays they write are an insult to the adult
intelligence, they are distressed. They would like to do
better, and so the young, aspiring ones, still trailing
clouds of glory, sit down to write plays of ideas. That it
can be done, and bring fame and fortune, the example of
Bernard Shaw is there to show them.

The influence of Shaw on the English stage of to-day
has been devastating. The public have not always liked
his plays, any more than they liked Ibsen’s, but after
seeing them they have liked those written according to
the old conventions even less. Disciples arose who
sought to follow in his steps, but the event has proved
that it was impossible to do so without his great gifts.
The most talented of these was Granville Barker. As
many scenes in his plays show, Granville Barker had it in
him to be a very good playwright; he had a dramatic gift,
flicility for writing easy, natural and amusing dialogue,
and an eye for theatrically eficctive character. The in-
fluence of Shaw led hint to attach importance to ideas
that were somewhat commonplace and to supposb that
the natural ^discursiveness of his mind was a virtue. If he
had not be^ persuaded that the public were fools, who
must be b;tllied rather than cajoled, he would by the
usual method of trial and error have learnt to correct his
faults, and then might have added to the drama of this
country a number of popular plays of great excellence.
The lesser followers of ^rnard Shaw have only copied
his defects. Shaw has succeeded on the stage not because
he is a dramatist of ideas, but because he is a dramatist.
But he is inimitable. He owes his originality to an
idiosyncrasy, not of course peculiar to himself, that had
never before found expression on the sta^e. The
English, whatever they were in the Elizabethan eta, are
not an amorous race. Love with them is mqte senti-
mental than passionate. They are of course sufficiently
sexual for the purpose of reproducing their species, but
they cannot control the instinedve feeling that the sexual

94

act is disgusting. They ate mote inclined to look upon
love as anccdon ot benevolence than as passion. Th^
tegatd with approval its sublimations which dons
describe in scholarly books, and with tepulslon or with
ridicule its ftank »ptession. English is the only modetn
language in whiclrit has been found necessary to borrow
from the Latin a word with a depreciatory meaning, the
word uxorious, for a man’s devoted love for his wife.
That love should absorb a man has seemed to them un-
worthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for
women is generally regarded with s^pathy and admira-
tion; there is a feeling that it was worth while, and the
man who has done it feels even a certain pride in the feci?
in England he will be thought and will think himself
a damned fool. That is why Antony and Qeopatra has
always bcvU die least popular of Shakespeare’s greater
plays. Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to
throw away an empire for a woman’s sake. Indeed if it
were not founded on an accepted legend they would be
unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible.

To audiences who had been forced to sit through
plays in which love was the motive of the intrigue, but
who had an instinctive feeling that love, though all very
well in its way, was not really quite so important as the
dramatists pretended, for after all there were politics, golf,
getting on with one’s job and all sorts of othcf things, it
was a welcome relief to come upon a dramatist for whom
love was a tiresome, secondary business, a quick grati-
fication of a momentary impulse whose consequences
were generally awkward. Though put as things must be
put on the stage in an exaggerated way (and it should
never be forgotten that Shaw is an extremely skilful
dramatist) there was enough truth in this attitude to
impress. It responded to the deep-seated puritanism of
the Anglo-Saxon race. But, if not amorotis, the English
are sentimental and emotional, and they felt that it was
not the whole truth. When other dramatists repeated it,
not because it was, as with Shaw, a natural expression of
a personality, but because it was striking and effective, its
one-sidedness became tediously apparent. 'The author

9S

describes for you his private world, and if it interests you,
you will give him your attention. Tliere is no reason why
you should trouble yourself with a description of it at
second hand. It is inept to say again wlut Shaw has
said so well.

TO MY mind, the drama took a wrong turning when
the demand for realism led it to abandon the ornament of
verse. Verse has a specific dramatic value as anyone can
see by observing in himself the thrilling effect of a tirade
in one of Racine’s plays or of any of Shakespeare’s great
set pieces; and this is independent of the sense; it is due to
the emotional power of rhythmical speech. But more than
that: verse forces on the matter a conventional form that
heightens the aesthetic effect. It enables the drama to
achieve a beauty that is out of the question in a prose
play. However much you may admire The Wild Duck,
The Importance of Being Earnest or Man and Superman,
you cannot without abus^ of the word claim that they
are beautiful. But the chief value of verse is that it
delivers a play from sober reality. It puts it on another
level, at one remove from life, and so makes it easier for
the audience to attune themselves to that state of feeling
in which tjxey are most susceptible to the drama’s specific
appeal. In that artificial medium life is not presented in a
word-for-word translation, but in a free rendering, and
thus the dramatist has ample scope for the effects of which
his art is capable. For the drama is make-believe. It does
not deal with truth but with effect. That willing suspen-
sion of disbelief of which Coleridge wrote is essential to
it. The importance of truth to the dramatist is that it adds
to interest, but to the dramatist truth is only verisimili-
tude. It is what he can persuade his audience to accept.
If they will believe that a man can doubt his wife’s
fidelity because someone tells him he has found her hand-
kerchief in somebody else*s possession, well and good,
that is sufficient motive for his jealousy; if they will
believe that a six-course dinner can be eaten in ten

minutes, well and good again, the dramatist can get on
with his play. But when a greater and greater realism,
both in motive and in action, is demanded of him and he
is asked not to embroider gaily or romantically upon life
but to copy it, he is robbed of a great part of his resources.
He is forced to®forgo asides because people do not
naturally talk to themselves out loud; he may not tele-
scope events, by which he was able to accelerate his
action, but must cause them to occur as deliberately
as in real life; he must eschew accident and chance,
for we know (in the theatre) that things do not happen
like that. The result has shown that realism too often
can only produce plays that are drab and dull.

When the movies learnt to talk the prose play was
powerless to defend itself. The movies could represent
action niucl* more effectively, and action is the essence
of drama. The screen gave that artificiality which verse
had once given to^drama so that a different standard of
verisimilitude was set and improbability was acceptable
if only it gave rise to situation. It gave the opportunity
for all manner of novel, picturesque and dramatic effects
that stimulated and excited the public. The dramatist of
ideas had to swallow the bitter pill that the intelligentsia
for which he wrote would have nothing to do with his
plays, but roared with laughter at the farce and wallowed
in the thrills and spectacle of the moving pictures. The
fact was of course tliat they had succumbed to the atmo-
sphere the stage-play had taken pains to lose and were
delivered to the sway of make-believe that had held the
audiences who first saw the plays of Lope de Vega and
William Shakespeare.

I have always eschewed the prophetic role and have
left to others the reformation of my fellows, but I cannot
but state my belief that the prose drama to which I have
given so much of my life will soon be dead. The minor
arts, which depend on the manners and customs of the
time rather than on deep-seated human necessities, come
and go. The madrigal which was once a popular form of
musical entertainment, exciting composers to write for it
and producing an elaborate school of performers, suc-

97

I

cumbed when musical intruments were invented that
pfoduced mote beautifully the peculiar edects it sought;
and there is no reason why prose drama shotild not simet
the same fate. It may be said that the screen can never
give exactly the sympathetic thrill you feel when you see
living persons in flesh and blood bef<{re you. It might
very well have been said that strings and wood could
never make up for the intimate qi^ty of the human
voice. The event has proved that they could.

One thing seems certain, and that is that if the stage
play has any chance at all of survival, it is not by trying to
do any longer what the pictures can do better. Those
dramatists have followed a false trail who by a multitude
of litde scenes have tried to reproduce the rapid action
and varied setting of the cinematograph. It has occurred
to me that possibly the dramatist would be wise now to
go back to me origins of modern drama and call to his aid
verse, dancing, music and pageantry^ so that he might
appeal to all possible sources of entertainment; but I am
conscious that here again the cinema with its great
resources can do better whatever the spoken theatre can
do; and of course a play of this kind would need a
dramatist who was also a poet. Perhaps the best chance
the realistic dramatist has to-day is to occupy himself
with what,” till now at all events, the screen 1ms not suc-
ceeded vciy well in presenting — the drama in which the
action is inner rather than outer and the comedy of wit.
The screen demands physical action. Emotion which
cannot be translated into this, and the humoiir whose
appeal is mental, have litde value for it. It may be that,
for some time at all events, such plays would have iheir
appeal.

But so far as comedy is concerned, it shoiild be
recognized that the demand for realism is unjustified.
G>medy is an artificial thing and so only the appearance,
not the reality, of naturalism is in place. The laugh must
be soi^ht for its own sake. The playwright’s aim is not
now to represent life as it is (a tragic business) but to
comment on it satirically and amusingly. The audience
should not be allowed to ask, do such things happen?

They should be content to laugh. In comedy mote than
ever must the playwright exact a willing suspension of
disbelief. So the critics are wrong when diey complain
that a comedy now and then ‘degenerates’ into hirce. It
has been found in practice that it is impossible to hold the
attention of an wdience through three acts of pure
comedy. For comedy appeals to the collective mind of
the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals
to a more robust organ, their coUpctive belly. The great
writers of comedy, Shakespeare, Molifere and Bernard
Shaw, have never jibbed at the farcical. It is the life
blood that makes the body of comedy viable.

40

THESE IDiuAS floating vaguely in my mind had little
by little made me increasingly dissatisfied with the theatre
and at last I decide^ to have done with it. I have never
taken very comfortably to collaboration, and as I have
pointed out, a play is more than any other artistic product
a matter of collective effort. I«found it more and more
difficult to work in harmony with my collaborators.

It*is often said that good actors can get out of a play
more than the author has put into it. That is not true.
A good actor, bringing to a part his own talent, often
gives it a value that the layman on reading ths play had
not seen in it, but at the utmost he can do no more than
reach the ideal that the author has seen in his mind’s
eye. He has to be an actor of address to do this; for the
most part tlic author has to be satisfied with an approxi-
mation to the performance he visualized. In all my plays
I have been fortunate enough to have some of the parts
acted as I wanted; but in none have I had all the parts so
acted. This is obviously inevitable, for the actor who is
suited to a certain role may very well be engaged and you
have to put up with the second or the third best, because
there is no help for it. In recent years, as everyone knows
who has had to do with the casting of plays, the com-
petition of New York and of the pictures both in England
and America has made it more than ever difficult to get

the right person for a certain part; and over and over
again a manager finds himself obliged to engage an actor
who he knows is mediocre because no one else can be
got. Another difficulty is that of salaries. A small part
often wants clever playing and so an actor of experience,
but from the standpoint of the mfbnagement it will
only stand a certain salary and it is impracticable to
engage for it the proper person. The part then is
inadequately acted and the balance of the play jeopardized;
a scene that has a defimte value is thrown away because
it is improperly played. It often happens also that
the perfect actor for a part will not play it because
it is too small or too unsympathetic.

In saying all this, I have no intention of minimizing
my obligation to the distinguished actors and actresses to
whom is due so much of the success many of my plays
have had. My debt to them is great. The list of those who
fulfilled all my hopes is so long that it^would be tedious to
give it, but there is one actor whom, since he has never
reached the rank of a star and so has hardly received the
recogmtion that he desesvcs, I should like to mention.
This is C. V. France. He has acted in several of my plays.
He has never played a part in which he has not been
admirable; He has represented to the smallest particular
the character that I had in my mind’s eye. It would be
difficult tQ find on the English stage a more competent,
intelligent and versatile actor. On the other hand, I have
had plays produced in which I was conscious that the
audience were not seeing anything like what I wanted
them to see. Errors of casting, especially when they occur
with actors of reputation, can often not be rectified, and
then the author has the mortification of being judged by
something that is merely a misrepresentation of his
intent. There is no such thing as an actor-proof part.
There are effective parts, and parts, often very itnportant
ones, that are the reverse, but however efiectiye a part
is, it is only fully realized when it is perfectly played. The
ftinniest line in the world is only funny if it is said in the
right way; however tender a scene is it will go for nothing
if it is played without tenderness. Another pitfall that the

roo

actors prepare for the dramatist is one that is not often
realized. The system of choosing actors to play them-
selves makes it very difficult to avoid. An author devises
a character, then an actor is chosen because he has the
traits the author has indicated; but the addition of his
idiosyncrasies to t|^ose the author has already given his
character results in an absurd exaggeration; the person of
the author’s invention, who was plausible and natural, is
in this way turned into a grotesque. I have often sought
to cast an actor contrary to his ty][)e, but I do not know
that the notion has proved successful; it needs a greater
adaptability than modern actors have. Probably the
dramatist’s best way to cope with this difficulty is to
underwrite his parts, lightly sketching the characters and
counting on the actors to fill them in with their own
individualiuc. . But then he must be certain of getting
actors who can do this.

Exaggeration of this kind, wrong casting, inevitable
sometimes, already Sufficiently distort the author’s inten-
tion and this is too often further distorted by the director.
When I first began to write for the stage, directors took a
more modest view of their functions than they have lately
done. Then they confined themselves to cutting where
the author had been long-winded and disguising by their
ingenuity his errors of construction; they arranged the
positions of the actors and helped them to get the best out
of their parts. I think it must have been Reinhardt who
first exacted for the director a preponderating share in the
collaboration. His example was followed by directors
who lacked his talent and mote than once since the pre-
posterous claim has been made that the author’s script is
to be looked upon merely as a vehicle for the director to
express his own ideas. Instances have been known of
directors who imagined that they were playwrights.
Gerald du Mauricr, a very good director, told me himself
that he took no interest in directing a play that he could
not partly rewrite. This was an extreme case. But it has
certainly become very hard to find a director who is
content to interpret his author’s play; he has too often
come to look upon it as an opportunity for an original

lot

cteation of his own. The public would be surprised if
they knew how often an author’s purport is misrepre-
sented by the director’s stupid obstinacy and how much
vulgarity and silliness for which they bLunc him is due to
the director. The director is a man of ideas, but of few,
and that is a disastrous thing. To^ conceive ideas is
exhilarating, but it is only safe when you conceive so
many that you ascribe no undue consequence to them and
can take them for what they are worth. People who con-
ceive few find it very difficult not to regard them with
inordinate respect. A director who thinks of a scrap of
dialogue, a bit of business or a scenic effect, will attacm so
much importance to it tlut he will cheerfully hang up the
action of the play or distort its meaning in order to intro-
duce it. Too often the director is vain, self-opinionated
and unimaginative; he is sometimes so autocratic that he
will force the cast to reproduce his own intonations and
his own mannerisms; the actors, dependent on his good
word to get parts and on their docilify to gain his favour,
can but slavishly do as they ate told, thus taking all
spontaneity from their performance. The best director
is the one who does least. I have been lucky enough now
and then to be given directors who were honestlyianxious
to do their best by the play and who have tried to fulfil my
wishes; but it is very difficult to enter into somebody
else’s mind and the most sympathetic director can hardly
do more than give an adumbration of the author’s inten-
tion. I think he often gives the audience something that
they like more than they would have liked what the
author meant. But that is not to the author’s purpose.

The remedy of course is for the author to direct his
own play. Few can but those who have themselves been
actors. It is not enough to be able to tell an actot that an
intonation or a gesture is wrong, you must be able to
show him by word and deed what is right. This is mote
than ever necessary now that the players of mit|or parts <
have an inadequate technique. Gerald du Mauder used
often to do thus by the mortifying, but efficacious,
expedient of caricaturing the manner in which an actor
had done something and then showing him how it should

be done. He could do this only because he was a vety
good mimic and a vety good actor. But is a small
matter. Direction is a complicated ai&ir. It is a business,
or if you like an art, of its own that has to be acquired
with pains. The director deals with the mechanics of tihe
pla;^, the entranc^ and exits, the positions assigned to
various characters so that their grouping may be seemly
and that they may be so placed that at the proper time the
attention of the audience is easily turned on them; he
takes into consideration the peculiarities of individual
actors and when one is asked to do something that is not
within his powers by subterfuge gets over the difficulty;
he is mindful also of the peculiarities of actors in general,
such as that no English player can now say a speech of
more than twenty lines without feeling self-conscious, and
devises means i.f overcoming their diffidence; he directs
the audience’s interest to the main points of the play and
lures them by ingenuity to support the necessarily dull
passages of expositfon and the joins, the introductions to
dramatic episodes, that no play can avoid; he takes
account of the facility with whtfh their attention wanders
and by the invention of ‘business’ holds it at dangerous
points;,he considers the susceptibilities, the jealousy and
vanity of actors and takes care that natural egoism does
not disturb the balance of the play; he sees that every part
is given its appropriate value and that no actof to make
his own more important encroaches on somebody else’s.
He decides when to go quick and when to go slow; when
to emphasize, when to slur; when to play up and when to
play down. He deals with the sets and sees that they ate
suitable and practicable to the action; he chooses the
clothes to fit the parts and keeps a close watch on the
actresses who would sooner be beautifully than aptly
dressed; he concerns himself with lighting. Direction is a
business, or an art, that needs technical Imowledge of an
elaborate order. It needs moreover tact, patience, good
humour, firmness and pliability. For mysm, I have oeen
well aware that I possessed none of the knowledge and
few of the qualifies that are needed to direct a play. I was
luunpieted besides by my stammer and by the unfortunate

10 )

accident that after I had written a play and finally cor-
rected the typescript I could no longer take any great
interest in it. I was curious to see how it would act, but
when once I had given it over to others, Uke a bitch who
takes no more concern in her puppies when others have
handled them, I could no longer look \ pon it any more as
intimately my own. I have been blamed often for yielding
too easily to directors and accepting their opmions when
they were contrary to my own; the fact is that I have
always been inclined tolthink that others knew better than
I; I have never Uked rows unless I was in a temper and I
am seldom in a temper, and lastly, I did not very much
care. What added to my growing distaste for the theatre
was not that directors were sometimes incompetent, but
that they were necessary at alL

41

AND NO IF the audience. It must seem ungracious that
I should express anything but gratitude to the public that
has given me, if not fame, at least notoriety and a fortune
that has enabled me to live in the same style as my father
lived in before me. I have travelled; I live in a house with
a view of the sea, silent and apart from other habitations,
in the middle of a garden, with spacious rooms. I have
always thought life too short to do anything for one-
self that one can pay others to do for one and I have
been rich enough to afford myself the luxury of only
doing for myself what I alone can do. I have been able to
entertain my friends and to help people whom I wanted
to help. All this I owe to the favour of the public. I found
myself, notwithstanding, growing more and more im-
patient with that section of it that makes up the theatrical
audience. I have mentioned the fact that from the first I
felt a singular embarrassment at witnessing one of my
own plays, and this, instead of growing less ivith each
play I produced, as I might have expected, grew greater.
The feeling that a mass of people were seeing my plays
became a sort of horror of distaste, so that I found myseff
going out of my way to avoid the street in which the

104

theatre was situated where they were acting one of my
plays.

I had long come to the conclusion that there was not
much point in a play that was not successful and I thought
I knew exactly how to write a successful play. I knew,
that is to say, w1\at I could expect from an audience.
Without their collaboration I could do nothing and I
knew how far their collaboration could go. I found
myself increasingly dissatisfied with this. The dramatist
must share the prepossessions of his audience, the
example of Lope de Vega and Shakespeare is there to
prove it, and at his boldest he can do no more than put
into words what they from cowardice or laziness have
been contented only to feel and not to express. I was
tired of giving half a truth because that was all they were
prepared to ta.Lc. 1 grew tired of the absurdity that admits
in conversation all manner of facts that must be denied on
the stage. I wearied of the necessity of fitting my theme
into a certain compass, drawing it out to an unnecessary
length or unduly constricting it because a play to attract
had to be of a definite length. J grew bored with trying
never to be boring. In fact, I did not want to conform
any longer to the necessary conventions of the drama.
I suspected that I was out of touch with the taste of the
public and to decide the matter went to a number of plays
that were drawing the town. I found them ];edious. I
could not laugh at the jokes that amused the delighted
audience and the scenes that moved them to tears left
me stone cold. That settled it.

I sighed for the liberty of fiction and I thought with
pleasure of the lonely reader who was willing to listen to
all I had to say and with whom I could effect an intimacy
that I could never hope for in the garish publicity of the
theatre. I had known too many dramatists who had
survived their popularity. I had seen them pitiftdly
writing their own plays over and over again without an
inkling that the times had changed; I had seen others
desperately attempting to capture the modern spirit and
dismayed when their efforts were treated with derision.
I had seen famous authors treated with contumely, when

lOJ

Thi SVVJffNQ UF. H

they ofleted a play to managets who had once pesteced
them with contracts. I had heard actors’ scornful com-
ments on dtem. I had seen the bewilderment, the con-
sternation, the bitterness with which they realized at last
that the public was finished with them. I had heard
Arthur Pinero and Henry Arthur Jon^, both celebrated
in their day, say to me identically the same words, one
with a grim, sardonic humour, the other with a puzzled
exasperation; the words were: ‘They don’t want me
any more.’ 1 thought 1 would go while the going was
good.

42

BUT I had several plays still in my head. Two or three
of these were little more than vague schemes and I was
willing enough to let them go, but there were four that
were lying pigeon-holed in my fancy all ready to be
written, and I knew myself well enough to be aware that
they would continue to pester me till I wrote them. I had
been thinking of them all for a good many years; I had
done nothing about them because I did not think they
would please. I have always had a dislike, to managers
losing money over m^, due, I suppose, to my bour-
geois instincts, and on the whole they have not. It is
generally accepted that it is four to one against a play
being profitable to a management; I do not think I am
exaggerating when I say that the event has proved that
with me it has been four to one on. I wrote these four
plays in the order in which I expected them to be increas-
ingly unsuccessful. I did not want to destroy my reputa-
tion with the public till I was definitely finished with it.
The first two surprised me by having a considerable
success. The last two had as little as I expected. I will
speak but of one of them, The Sacred Flame, and of this
only because in it I tried an experiment that some readers
of this book may think interesting enough to meijit a few
minutes’ consideration. I tried in this play to write a
more formal dialogue than I had been in the habit of
using. I wrote my first full-length play in 1898, my last

lOt

in 1955. In that time 1 have seen dialogue change from
the tufgjid, pedantic speech of Pineto, from the elegant
artifici^ty of Oscar Wilde, to the extreme colloquialism
of the present day. The demand for realism has inveigled
dramatists into a naturalism ever greater and greater,
a style that has Ijpen cultivated to its utmost limit, as
we know, by Noel G>watd. Not only is the ‘literary’
avoided, but actuality has been so much sought after
that grammar is eschewed, sentences are broken, for
it is said that in ordinary life '"'people speak ungram-
matically and in short or unfinished sentences, and a
vocabulary has been employed in which only the simplest
and most ordinary words are allowed. This dialogue
is eked out with shrugs, waves of the hand and grimaces.
In thus yielding to the fashion it seems to me that
dramatists have gravely handicapped themselves. For
this slang)"-, clipped, broken speech they reproduce is
only the speech of a class, the speech of the young, ill-
educated well-to-dfl, who are described in the papers as
the smart set. They are the persons who figure in the
gossip columns and in the pages of illustrated weeklies,
it may be a fact that the English are tongue-tied, but I do
not think they are so tongue-tied as we are now asked to
believe. There are a great many people, members of the
various professions and cultured women, who clothe
their thoughts in grammatical, well-chosen language and
can say what they want to in the tight words, put in the
right order, with distinction. The present mode, which
forces a judge or an eminent physician to express himself
as inadequately as a bar-lounger, grossly misrepresents
the truth. It has narrowed the range of character that the
dramatist can deal with, for he can only show this by
speech, and it is impossible to portray people of any
subtlety of mind or intricacy of emotion when his dia-
logue is but a sort of spoken hietogljrph. He is insensibly
led to choose as his characters persons who talk naturally
in the way his audience have come to tlunk natural and
these inevitably are very simple and obvious. It has
restricted his Aemes since it is hard to deal with the
fundamental issues of human life, it is impossible to

107

analyse the complexities of human nature (dtamatic
subjects both) when you confine yourself to a naturalistic
dialogue. It has killed comedy, which depends on verbal
wit, which in turn depends on the well-turned phrase. It
has thus knocked another nail in the coffin of prose drama.

I thought then that in The Sacrec^Flame I would try
to make my characters speak not the words they would
actually have spoken, but in a more formal manner, using
the phrases they would have used if they had been able
to prepare them beforeband and had known how to put
what they wanted to say in exact and well-chosen lan-
guage. It may be that I did not manage it very well.
During rehearsals I found that the actors, no longer
used to speeches of this sort, had an uncomfortable
feeling that they were delivering a recitation and I had to
simplify and break up my sentences. I left enough to
give the critics grounds for animadversion, and my
dialogue was, in some quarters, blamed because it was
‘literary.’ I was told that people did hot speak like that.
I never thought they did. But I did not insist. I was in
the position of a man in a rented house, whose lease is
expiring; it is not worth his while to make structural
alterations. In my last two plays I reverted «to the
naturalistic dialogue I had hitherto used.

When /or days you have been going through a
mountain, pass, a moment comes when you are sure that
after winding round the great mass of rock in front of
you, you will come upon the plain; but instead you are
faced with another huge crag and the weary trail con-
tinues; surely after this you will see the plain; no; the
path winds on and another mountain bars your way. And
then suddenly it lies before you. Your heart exults;
there it stretches wide and sunny; the oppression of the
mountains is lifted from your shoulders and with ex-
hilaration you breathe the more spacious air. You have a
wonderful sense of freedom. So I felt when I had done
with my last play.

I cwuld not tell whether I was free from the theatre
for good and all, for the author is the slave of what, for
want of a more modest word, I am forced to call his

lot

inspiration, and 1 could not be certain that a theme would
not some day occur to me that I could not but write in the
form of a play. I hoped not. For 1 was possessed of a
notion which I cannot expect the reader to think otbet
than foolishly arrogant. I had had all the experience that
it seemed possible^e theatre could give me. I had made
as much money as I needed to live in the sort of way that
pleased me and to provide for such as had claims on me.
I had won a great notoriety and perhaps even a passing
fame. I might have been satisfied. But there was one
thing more I wanted to achieve and this it seemed to me
I could not hope to reach in the drama. Perfection,
I looked not at my own plays, of whose faults no one
could be mote irritably conscious than I, but at the pla 3 rs
that have come down to us from the past. Even the
greatest h'*'' c grave defects. You have to make excuses
for them by considering the conventions of the time and
the conditions of tjjie stage for which they were written.
The great Greek tragedies are so far from us and interpret
a civilisation that is now so strange that it is hard to judge
them candidly. It has seemed to me that perhaps
Antigone came very near perfection. In the modern
drama *I think no one on occasion approached it more
closely than Racine. But at the cost of how many a limi-
tation! It was a cherry stone that he carved with
infinite skill. Only idolatry can refuse to sec»the great
shortcomings in the conduct and sometimes in the
characterisation of Shakespeare’s plays; and this is very
comprehensible since, as we know, he sacrificed every-
thing to effective situation. All these plays were written
in imperishable verse. When you come to the modern
prose drama and look for perfection you will not find it.
I suppose it will be admitted that Ibsen is the greatest
dramatist the last hundred years have seen. For all the
vast merits of his plays, how poverty-stricken was his
invention, how repetitive his cliaracters, and how silly,
when you go a little below the surface, ate too many of
his subjects! It looks as though defects of one sort or
another were inherent in the art of drama. To get one
result you must sacrifice another, so that to write a play

JOf

petfect in all its patticulats, in the interest and significance
of its theme, in the subtlety and originality of its charac-
terisation, in the plausibility of its intrigue and in the
beauty of its dialogue, is impossible. It seemed to me
that in the novel and in the short story perfection had
been sometimes achieved, and thou^ I could scarcely
hope to reach it, I had a notion that in those mediums 1
comd come nearer to it than I had any chance of doing in
the drama. i

43

THE FIRST novel I wrote was called Liisa of Lambeth.
It was accepted by the first publisher to whom I sent it.
For some time Fisher Unwin had been bringing out in
what he called The Pseudonym Series a number of short
novels which had attracted a good deal of attention;
among them were those of John OJiver Hobbs. They
were thought witty and audacious. They made the
author’s name and confirmed the prestige of the series. I
wrote two short stories which together, I thought, would
make a volume of a size suitable for this collection and
sent them to Fisher Unwin. After some time he returned
them, but with a letter asking me if I had not a novel I
could submit to him. This was so great an encourage-
ment thael immediately sat down and wrote one. Since I
was working at the hospital all day I could only write
in the evening. I used to get home soon after six, read my
Star, which I bought at the cornet of Lambeth Bridge,
and as soon as the table was cleared after an early meal,
set to work.

Fisher Unwin was hard on his authors. He took
advantage of my youth, my inexperience, and my delight
at having a book accepted, to make a contract with me
whereby I was to get no royalty at all till he had sold so
many copies; but he knew how to push his ware$ and he
sent my novel to a number of infiuential persons. It was
widely, though diversely, reviewed, and Basil Wilber-
force, afterwards Archdeacon of Westminster, preached
about it in the Abbey. The Senior Obstetric Physician at

no

St. Thomases Hospital was sufficiently impressed by it to
offer me a minor appointment under him, for soon after
it appeared I passed my fina! examinations; but this,
exaggerating its success, and determined to abandon the
medical profession, I unwisely refused. A second edition
was called for witWn a month of publication and I had no
doubt that I could easily earn my living as a writer. I was
somewhat shaken when, a year later, on my return from
Seville, I received from Fisher Unwin a cheque for my
royalties. It amounted to twenty pounds. Ifl may judge
by its continuing sales Liza of Lambeth is still readable,
but any merit it may have is due to the luck I had in being,
by my work as a medical student, thrown into contact
with a side of life that at that time had been little ex-
ploited by novelists. Arthur Morrison with his Tales
of Mean and A Child of the Jago had drawn the

attention of the public to what were then known as the
lower classes and I profited by the interest he had aroused.

1 knew notliing about writing. Though for my age I
had read a good deal, I had read without discrimination,
devouring one after the other books I had heard of to find
out what they were about, and though I suppose I got
something out of them, it was the novels and short stories
of Guy de Maupassant that had most influence on me
when I set myself to write. I began to read them when I
was sixteen. Whenever I went to Paris I spent my after-
noons in the galleries of the Oddon browsing among the
books there. A certain number of Maupassant’s books
had been reissued in little volumes at seventy-five cen-
times and these I bought; but the others cost three francs
fifty, a sum that I could not afford, so I used to take a
book out of the shelves and read what I could of it. The
attendants in their pale grey smocks took no notice of me
and it was often possible when none of them was looking
to cut a page and continue the narrative without inter-
ruption. Thus I managed to read most of Maupassant
before I was twenty. Though he docs not enjoy now the
reputation he did then it must be admitted that he had
great merits. He was lucid and direct, he had a sense of
form, and he knew how to get the utmost dramatic value

III

out of the story he had to tell. I cannot but think that he
was a better master: to follow than the English novelists
who at that time influenced the young. In Liza of
Lambeth 1 described without addition or exaggeration the
people 1 had met in the out-patients’ department at the
Hospital and in the district during fny service as an
obstetric clerk, the incidents that had struck me when I
went from house to house as the work called, or, when I
had nothing to do, hadtseen on my idle saunterings. My
lack of imagination (for imagination grows by exercise
and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the
mature than in the young) obliged me to set down quite
straightforwardly what I had seen with mjf own eyes and
heard with my own ears. Such success as the book had
was due to a lucky chance. It augured nothing for my
future. But this I did not know.

Fisher Unwin pressed me to write another much
longer book about the slums. He tol^ me that was what
the public wanted from me and prophesied that it would
have, now that I had broken the ice, a far greater success
than Liza of Lambeth. But this was not in my ideas at all.
I was ambitious. I had a feeling, I do not know where I
got it, that you must not pursue a success, but fly from it;
and I had learnt from the French to set no great store on
the roman rigionaL I was no longer interested in the
slums onse I had written a book about them, and I had
indeed already finished a novel of a very different sort.
Fisher Unwin must have been dismayed when he received
it. It was a novel set in Italy during the Renaissance and
it was founded on a story I had read in MachiavelU’s
History of Florence. I wrote it because of some articles
by Andrew Lang that I read on the art of fiction. In one
of them he argued, very convincingly to me, that the his-
torical novel was the only one that the young author
could hope to write with success. For he could not have
sufficient experience of life to write of contemporary
manners; history provided him with a story and ch^cters
and the romantic fervour of his young blood gave him
the dash that was needed for this sort of composition.
I know now that this was nonsense. In the first place

112

It i$ not true that the young author has not sufficient
knowledge to write about his contemporaries. I do not
suppose one ever in after life knows people so intimately
as those with whom one’s childhood and early youth
have been passed. One’s family, the servants with whom
so much of a chilci’s life is spent, one’s masters at school,
other boys and girls — the boy knows a great deal about
them. He sees them with directness. Adults discover
themselves, consciously and unc^onsciously, to the very
young as they never do to other adults. And the child,
the boy, is aware of his environment, the house he lives
in, the countryside or the streets of the town, in a detail
that he can never realize again when a multitude of past
impressions has blurred his sensibilities. The historical
novel calls surely for a profound experience of men to
create UvLig • »ple out of those persons who with their
different manners and different notions at first sight seem
so alien to us; andtto recreate the past needs not only a
vast knowledge but an effort of imagination that is hardly
to be expected in the young. I should have said that
the truth was exactly contrary to what Andrew Lang
said. The novelist should turn to the historical novel
towards the end of his career, when thought and the
vicissitudes of his own life have brought him knowledge
of the world, and when, having for years explored the
personalities of people around him, he has acquired an
intuition into human nature that will enable him to
understand and so to recreate the figures of a past age.
I had written my first novel of what I knew, but now,
seduced by this bad advice, set to work on a historical
romance. I wrote it in Capri, during the long vacation,
and such was my ardour that 1 had myself awakened
every morning at six and wrote with perseverance till
hunger forced me to break off and have breakfast. I had at
least the sense to spend the rest of the morning in the sea.

44

TI IJIKE IS no need for me to speak of the novels I wrote
during the next few years. One of them, Mrs. Graddock,

I'i

was not unsuccessful and I have reprinted it in the
collected edition of my works. Of the others two were
novelisations of plays that 1 had £uled to get produced
and for long they lay on my conscience like a discreditable
action; I would have given much to suppress them. But
I know now that my qualms were unntcessary. Even the
greatest authors have written a number of very poor
books. Balzac himself left a good many out of the
Com^die Humaine, ani of those he inserted there are
several that only the student troubles to read; the writer
can rest assured that the books he would like to forget
will be forgotten. I wrote one of these books because I
had to have enough money to catty me on for the
following year; the other because I was at the time much
taken with a young person of extravagant tastes and the
gratification of my desires was frustrated by the attentions
of mote opulent admirers who were able to provide the
luxuries that her frivolous soul hanjccred after. 1 had
nothing much to offer but a serious disposition and a sense
of humour. I determined to write a book that would
enable me to earn three or four hundred pounds with
which I could hold my own with my rivals. For the
young person was attractive. But even if you wofk hard
it takes a long time to write a novel; you have to get it
published; then publishers do not pay you till many
months hftve elapsed. The result was that by the time I
received the money the passion that I had thought woxdd
last for ever was extinct and I had no longer the slightest
wish to spend it in the way I had intended. I went to
Egypt on it.

With these two exceptions the books I wrote during
the first ten years after I became a professional writer were
the exercises by which I sought to learn my business. For
one of the difficulties that beset the professional writer is
that he must acquire his craft at the expense of the public.
He is constrained to write by the instinct within him and
his brain teems with subjects. He has not the skill to cope
with them. His experience is narrow. He is crude and he
does not know how to make the best of such gifts as he
has. And when he has finished his book he must publish

it if he can, partly of course to get the money to live on;
but also because he does not know what it is like till it is
in print, and he can only find out his errors from the
opinions of his friends and the criticisms of the reviewers.
I have always heard that Guy de Maupassant submitted
whatever he wrot| to Flaubert and it was not till he had
been writing for some years that Flaubert allowed him to
publish his first story. As all the world knows it was that
little masterpiece c^ed Boule (}e Suif. But this is an
exceptional case. Maupassant had a post in a government
office that provided him both with a living and with
sufficient leisure to write. There are few people who
would have the patience to wait so long before trying
their luck with the public and fewer still who can have had
the good fortune to find so conscientious and great a
writer as F'-mbert to direct them. For the most part
writers waste in this way subjects that they could have
made good use of if they lud not treated them till they
had a greater kncTvtrledge of life and a more intimate
acquaintance with the technique of their art. I sometimes
wish that I had not had die good fortune to get my
first book accepted immediately, for then I should have
continued with medicine; I should have got the usual
hospital appointments, gone as assistant to general
practitioners in various parts of the country, and done
locums; 1 should thus have acquired a mass o£ valuable
eiroerience. If my books had been refused one after the
other I should have come before the public at last with
work less imperfect. I regret that I had no one to guide
me; I might have been spared much misdirected effort.
I knew a few literary people, not many, for even then 1
had a feeling that their company, though pleasant enough,
was unprofitable to the author, and I was too shy, too
arrogant and too diffident, to seek their counsel. I
studied the French novelists more than the English, and
having got what I was capable of getting from Mau-
passant, turned to StendlUl, Balzac, the Goncourts,
Flaubert and Anatole France.

I tried various experiments. One of them at tnai
time had a certain novelty. The experience of life I was

lit

for ever eagerly seeking suggested to me that the
novelist’s method of taking two or three people, or even
a group, and describing dieir adventures, spiritual and
otherwise, as though no one else existed and nothing else
was happening in the world, gave a very partial picture of
reality. I was myself living in sever^ sets that had no
connection with one another, and it occurred to me that
it might give a truer picture of life if one could carry on
at the same time the va^ous stories, of equal importance,
that were enacted during a certain period in difierent
circles. I took a larger number of persons than I had ever
sought to cope with before and devised four or five
independent stories. They were attached to one another
by a very thin thread, an elderly woman who knew at
least one person in each group. The book was called
The Merry-Go-Round. It was rather absurd because
owing to the influence on me of the aesthetic school of the
nineties I made everyone incredibly beautiful, and it was
written in a tight and affected manner. But its chief
defect was that it lacked the continuous line that directs
the reader’s interest; the stories were not after all of equal
importance and it was tiresome to divert one’s attention
from one set of people to another. I failed from my
ignorance of the very simple device of seeing the diverse
events and the characters that took part in them through
the eyes of a single person. It is a device which of cotirse
the autobiographical novel has used for centuries, but
which Henry James has very usefully developed. By the
simple process of writing he for I and stepping down from
the omniscience of an all-knowing narrator to the im-
perfect acquaintance of a participator he showed how
to give unity and verisimilitude to a story.

4J

I HAVE a notion that I was more slow to develop than
most writers. Around the years that ended the old
century and began the new one I was looked upon as a
clever young writer, rather precocious, harsh and some-
what unpleasant, but worth consideration. Though I

ii4

made little money out of them my books were reviewed
at length and consdentiously. But when I compare my
early novels with those that are written by young men
now I cannot but see that theirs ate vastly more accom-
plished. The ageing writer does weli to keep in touch
with what the yo^g do and from time to time I read
their noveis. Girls stili in their teens, youths at the
university, produce books that seem to me well-written,
well-composed and ripe with e:q)f rience. I do not know
whether the young mature sooner than they did forty
years ago or whether it is that the art of fiction has in that
time so much advanced that it is now as easy to write a
good novel as then it was difficult to write even, a
mediocre one. If one takes the trouble to look through
the volumes of The Yellow Book, which at that time
seemed the ’-ist thing in sophisticated intelligence, it is
startling to discover how thoroughly bad the majority of
its contributions were. For all their parade these writers
were no more thafi an eddy in a backwater and it is
unUkely that the history of English literature wiU give
them more than a passing glance. 1 shiver a little when I
turn those musty pages and ask myself whether in another
forty years the bright young things of current letters will
appear as jejune as do now their maiden aunts of The
Yellow Book.

It was fortunate for me that I suddenly ,^chieved
popularity as a dramatist and so was reheved of the
necessity of writing a novel once a year to earn my living.
I found plays easy to write; the notoriety they brought me
was not unpleasing; and they earned for me enough
money to enable me to live less straitly than I had been
obliged to. I have never had the bohemian trait of being
unconcerned for the morrow. I have never liked to
borrow money. I have hated to be in debt. Not has the
squalid life had any attraction for me. I was not born in
squalid circumstances. As soon as I could afford it I
bought a house in Mayfair.

There are people who despise possessions. Of
course when they say that it ill becomes the artist thus to
cumber himself drey may be right, but it is not a view that

II7

artists tbemselyes have held. They have never lived firom
choice in the garrets in which their admirers like to see
them. They have much more often ruined themselves by
the extravagance with which they conducted themselves.
After all they are creatures of imagination and state
appeals to them, fine houses, servants to do their bidding,
ti(^ carpets, lovely pictures, and sun!ptuous furniture.
Titian and Rubens lived like princes. Pope had his
Gri>tto and his Quincpnx and Sir Walter his Gothic
Abbotsford. El Greco with his suites of rooms, his
musicians to play to him while he ate, his library and his
grand clothes, ^ed bankrupt. It is unnatural for the
artist to live in a semi-detached villa and eat cottage pie
cooked by a maid of all work. It shows, not dis-
interestedness, but an arid, petty soul. For of course to
the artist the luxury with which he likes to surround him-
self is but a diversion. His house, his grounds, his cars,
his pictures, are playthings to amuse his fancy; they ate
visible tokens of his power; they do fiot penetrate to his
essential aloofness. For myself I can say that, having had
every good thing that money can buy — an experience like
another — ^I could part without a pang with every posses-
sion I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may
yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy
my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public
library, ggns and paper, I should regret nothing. I was
glad to earn a great deal of money as a dramatist. It gave
me liberty. I was careful with it because I did not want
ever again to be in a position when for want of it I could
not do an3^ing I had really a mind to.

46

I AM a writer as I might have been a doctor or a lawyer.
It is so pleasant a profession that it is not surprising if a
vast number of persons adopt it who have no cjualifica-
tions for it. It is exciting and various. The writer is free
to work in whatever place and at whatever time he
chooses; he is free to idle if he feels ill or dispirited. But it
is a profession that has disadvantages. One is that

jxt

though the whole world, with everyone in it and all its
sights and events, is your material, you yourself can only
> d^ with what corresponds to some secret spring in your ^
own nature. The mine is incalculably rich, but each one
of us can get from it only a definite amount of ore. Thus
in the midst of plenty the writer may starve to death. His
material fails him ind we say that he has written himself
out. I think there are few writers who are not haunted by
the fear of this. Another disadvantage is that the pro-
fessional writer must please. Unless a sufficient number
of persons can be found to read him he will starve. Some-
times the stress of circumstances is too great for him and
with rage in his heart he yields to the demand of the
public. One must not expect too much of human nature
and an occasional pot-boiler may be accepted from him
with lenity. The writers who are in independent circum-
stances should sympathize with, rather than sneer at,
those of their brethren whom hard necessity sometimes
forces to do hack Work. One of the minor sages of
Chelsea has remarked that the writer who wrote for
money did not write for him. He has said a good many
wise things (as indeed a sage should) but this was a very
silly one; for the reader has notliing to do with the motive
for which the author writes. He is only concerned with
the result. Many writers need the spur of necessity to
write at all (Samuel Johnson was one of them), ^t they
do not write for money. It would be foolish of them if
they did, for there are few avocations in which with equal
ability and industry you cannot earn more money than by
writing. Most of the great portraits of the world have
been painted because their painters were paid to do them.
In painting as in writing the excitement of the work is
such that when it is once started the artist is absorbed in
doing it as well as he can. But just as the painter will not
get commissions unless on the whole he satisfies his
patrons, so the writer's books will not be read unless on
the whole they interest his readers. Yet there is in
. writers a feeling that the public ought to like what they
write and if their books do not sell the fault is not with
them but with the public. I have never met an author

//y

who admitted that people did not buy his book because it
was dull. There are many instances of artists whose work
for long has been little appreciated and who yet in the
end achieved feme. We do not, however, hear of those
whose work has continued to be ignored. Their number
is far greater. Where are the votive offerings of those who
perished? If it is true that talent ednsists in a certain
facility combined with a peculiar outlook on the world it
is very understandable, that originality should not at first
be welcomed. In this perpetually changing world people
are suspicious of novelty and it takes them some time
before they can accustom themselves to it, A writer with
an idiosyncrasy has to find little by little the people to
whom it appeals. Not only does it take him time to be
himself, for the young are Aemsclves only with timidity,
but it takes him time to convince that body of persons,
whom he will eventually rather pompously call his public,
that he has sometliing to give them that they want. The
more individual he is the harder will tie find it to achieve
this and the longer will it take him to earn his living.
Nor can he be sure that the result will be lasting, for it
may be that with all his individuality he has but one or
two things to give and then he will soon sink back into
the obscurity from which he difficultly emerged.

It is easy to say that the writer should have an occu-
pation ihat provides him with his bread and butter and
write in such leisure as this occupation affords him. This
course, indeed, was forced upon him very generally in the
past, when the author, however distinguished and
popular, could not earn enough money by writing to keep
body and soul together. It is forced upon him still in
countries with a small reading public; he must eke out his
livelihood by work in an office, preferably under the
government, or by journalism. But the English-speaking
writer has the potentiality of such an cnormops public
that writing can very reasonably be adopted asja profes-
sion. It would be more overcrowded than it is if in
English-speaking countries the cultivation o^ the arts
were not slightly despised. There is a healthy feeling that
to write or to paint is not a man’s work, and the social

force of this keeps many from entering the ranks. You
have to have a very decided urge to enter a profession
which exposes you to at least a small degree of moral
obloquy. In France and in Germany writing is an
honourable occupation, and so is adopted with the con-
sent of parents even though its financial rewards are
unsatisfactory. Y6u can often run across a German
mother who, when you ask her what her young son is
going to be, will answer with coptiplacency, a poet; and
in France the family of a girl witli a large dot will look
upon her marriage with a young novelist of talent as a
suitable alliance.

But the author does not only write when he is at his
desk; he writes all day long, when he is thinking, when
he is reading, when he is experiencing; everything he sees
and feels is ‘‘io^nificant to his purpose and, consciously or
unconsciously, ne is for ever storing and making over his
impressions. He cannot give an undivided attention to
any other calling. ‘*He will not follow it to his own
satisfaction or that of his employers. The most common
one for him to adopt is journalism, because it seems to
have a closer connection with his proper work. It is the
most dangerous. There is an impersonality in a news-
paper, that insensibly affects the writer. People who write
much for the press seem to lose the faculty of seeing
things for themselves; they see them from a generalized
standpoint, vividly often, sometimes with hectic bright-
ness, yet never with that idiosyncrasy which may give
only a partial picture of the facts, but is suffused by
the personality of the observer. The press, in fact, kills
the individuality of those who write for it. Nor is
reviewing less harmful; the writer has not the time to
read any books but those that directly concern him, and
this reading of hundreds of books haphazard, not for
the spiritual advantage he may gain from them but to
give a reasonably honest account of them, deadens his
sensibilities and impedes the free flow of his own imagina-
tion. Writing is a whole time job. To write must be
the main object of the author’s life; that is to say, he must
be a professional writer. He is lucky if he has sufficient

I2I

Tbb BamaRo tTr. I

foitune to make hipi independent of his earnings, but
that does not prevent him from being a professional
writer. Swift with his deanery, Wordsworth with his
sinecure, were just as much professional writers as
Balzac and Dickens.

47

IT IS acknowledged tVat the technique of painting and of
musical composition can only be acquired by assiduous
labour, and the productions of dilettantes are rightly re-
garded with good-humoured or exasperated contempt.
_We all congratulate ourselves that the radio and me
gramophone have driven from our drawing-rooms the
amateur pianist and the amateur singer. The technique of
writing is no less difficult than that of the other arts and
yet, because he can read and write a letter, there is a
notion that anyone can write well enough to write a book.
Writing seems now the favourite re'axation of the human
race. Whole families will take to it as in happier times
they entered religious houses. Women will write novels
to while away their pregnancies; bored noblemen, axed
officers, retired civil servants, fly to the pen as one might
fly to the bottle. There is an impression abroad that
everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is
implied* a good book the impression is false. It is true
that the amateur may sometimes produce a work of
merit. By a lucky chance he may have a natural facility for
writing well, he may have had experiences that are in
themselves interesting, or he may have a charming or
quaint personality that his very inexpertness helps him to
get down on the printed page. But let him remember that
the saying asserts only that everyone has it in him to write
one book; it says nothing about a second. The amateur
is wise not to try his luck again. Ilis next book js pretty
sure to be worthless.

For one of the great differences between the amateur
and the professional is that the latter has the capacity to
progress. The literature of a country is made not by a few
excellent books, I repeat, but by a great body of work, and

Hi

this can only be produced by professional writers. The
literature of those countries dmt has been produced chiefly
by amateurs is thin in comparison with that of the coun*
tries in which a number of men, with difflculty trying to
make their living, have followed it as a profession. A
body of work, an auvre, is the result of long-continued and
resolute effort. Thd author, like other men, learns by die
method of trial and error. {:lis early works are tentative;
he tries his hand at various subject^ and various methods
and at the same time develops his character. By a simul-
taneous process he discovers himself, which is what he
has to give, and learns how to display this discovery to
the best advantage. Then, in full possession of his
faculties, he produces the best of which he is capable.
Since writing is a healthy occupation, he will probably
go on living long after he has done this, and since by
this time writmg will have become an ingrained habit he
will doubtless continue to produce works of no great
consequence. Thestf the public may legitimately neglect.
From the standpoint of the reader, very little that the
writer produces in the whole course of his life is essential.
(By essential, I mean only that small part of him which
expresses his individuality, and I attach no implication of
absolute value to the word.) But I think he can only give
this as the result of a long apprenticeship and at the cost of
a good many failures. To do it he must make litera turg his
life’s work. He must be a professional author.

48

I HAVE spoken of the disadvantages of the author’s
profession: now I should like to speak of its dangers.

It is evident that no professional writer can afford
only to write when he feels like it. If he waits till he is in
die mood, till he has the inspiration as he says, he waits
indefinitely and ends by producing little or nothing. The
professional writer creates the mood. He has his inspira-
tion too, but he controls and subdues it to his bidding
by setting himself regular hours of work. But in time
writing l^omes a habit, and like the old actor in retire-

meat, who gets restless when the hour arrives at which
he has been accustomed to go down to the theatre
and make up for the evening performance, the writer
itches to get to his pens and paper at the hours at which
he has been used to write. Then he writes automatically.
Words come easily to him and words suggest ideas. They
are old and empty ideas, but his ptaihised hand can turn
out an acceptable piece. He, goes down to limcheon or
goes to bed with Ae ^surance that he has done a good
day’s work. Every production of an artist should be the
expression of an adventure of his soul. This is a counsel
of perfection and in an imperfect world a certain in-
dulgence should be bestowed on the professional writer;
but this surely is the aim he should keep before him.
He does well only to write to liberate his spirit of a
subject that he has so long meditated that it burdens
him and if he is wise he will take care to write only for
the sake of his own peace. Perhaps the simplest way to
break the habit of writing is by changing the environ-
ment to one that gives no opportunity for the daily task.
You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion
that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless
you form a habit; but habits in writing as in life.are only
useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be
advantageous.

the greatest danger that besets the professional
author is one that unfortunately only a few have to
guard against. Success. It is the most difficult thing the
writer has to cope with. When after a long and bitter
struggle he has at last achieved it he finds that it spreads
a snare to entangle and destroy him. Few of us have the
determination to avoid its perils. It must be dealt with
warily. The common idea that success spoils people by
making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is
erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most

E art, humble, tolerant and kind. Failure makes people
itter and cruel. Success improves the charact^ of the
man; it does not always improve the character of the
author. It may very well deprive him of that force which
has brought him success. His individuality has been

formed by his experiences, his struggles, his frustrated
hopes, his efforts to adapt himself to a hostile world; it
must be very stubborn if it is not modified by the soften-
ing influences of success.

Success besides often bears within itself the seed of
destruction, for it may very well cut the author off from
the materi^ that Vas its occasion. He enters a new
world. He is made much of. He must be almost super-
human if he is not captivated by tjpie notice taken of him
by the great and remains insensible to the attentions of
beautiful women. He grows accustomed to another way
of life, probably more luxurious than that to which he
has been used, and to people who have more of the
social graces than those with whom he has consorted
before. They are more intellectual and their superficial
brilliance is enraging. How difficult it is for him then
to move freely still in the circles with which he has been
familiar and which have given him his subjects! His
success has changed*him in the eyes of his old associates
and they are no longer at home with him. They may
look upon him with envy or with admiration, but no
longer as one of themselves. The new world into which
his success has brought him excites his imagination and
he writes about it; but he sees it from the outside and
can never so penetrate it as to become a part of it. No
better example of this can be given than Arnold Bf^ett.
He never Imew anything intimately but the life of the
Five Towns in which he had been born and bred, and it
was only when he dealt with them that his work had
character. When success brought him into the society of
literary people, rich men and smart women, and he
sought to deal with them, what he wrote was worthless.
Success destroyed him.

49

THE writer is wise then who is wary of success. He
must look with dread on the claims that others make on
him because of it, the responsibilities it forces on him, and
the hindering activities that it brings in its wake. It can

taj

only give him two good things: one, the mote important
by hx, is the freedom to foUow his own bent, and the
other is confidence in himself. Notwithstanding his pre-
tension and his susceptible vanity the author when he
compares his work widi what he intended it to be is never
free from misgiving. There is so great a distance between
what he saw in his mind’s eye and tile best he has been
able to do that for him the recult is no more than a make-
shift. He may be pleased with a page here or there and
regard an episode or a character with approval; I think
it must be very seldom that he looks upon any work of
his as a whole with complete satisfaction. At the back
of his mind is the suspicion that it is not good at all and
the praises of the public, even if he is inclined to doubt
their value, are a heaven-sent reassurance.

That is why praise is important to him. It is a weak-
ness that he should hanker for it; though perhaps £
pardonable one. For the artist should be indifferent to
praise and blame, since he is concerned with his work only
in its relation to himself, and how it affects the public
is a matter in which he is materially perhaps, but not
spiritually, concerned. The artist produces for the
liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as- it is the
nature of water to run down hill. It is not for nothing
that artists, have called their works the children of their
brain«^d hkened the pains of production to the pains of
childbirth. It is something like an organic thing that
develops, not of course only in their brains, but in their
heart, their nerves and their viscera, something that
their creative instinct evolves out of the experiences of
their soul and their body, and that at last becomes so
oppressive that they must rid themselves of it. When this
happens they enjoy a sense of liberation and for one
delicious moment rest in peace. But unlike human
mothers, they lose interest very soon in the child that is
born. It is no longer a part of them. It has given'them its
satisfacdon and now their souls are open td a new
impregnation.

In the production of his work, the author has ful-
filled himself. But that is not to say that it has any value

for anyone else. The reader of a book, the observer of a
picture, is not concerned with the artist’s feelings. The
artist has sought release, but the layman seeks for a
communication, and he alone can judge whether the
communication is valuable to him. To the artist the com-
miinication he offers is a by-product. I am not speaking
now of those wht> practise an art to teach; they ate
propagandists and with th^ art is a side issue. Artistic
creation is a specific activity thaMs satisfied by its own
exercise. The work created may be good art or bad
art. That is a matter for the layman to decide. He forms
his decision from the asthetic value of the communication
that is offered to him. If it yields escape from the reality
of the world he will welcome it, but is very likely at best
to describe it only as minor art; if it enriches his soul
and enlarges his personality he will rightly describe it
as great, but tlus, I insist, has nothing to do with the
artist; it is human that he should be pleased if he has
given others plcasuve or greater strength; but he should
not take it amiss if they find nothing to their purpose
in the results of his production. He has already had
his reward in the satisfaction of his creative instinct.
Now this is no counsel of perfection; it is the only con-
dition on which the artist can work his way towards the
unattainable perfection that is his aim. If he is a novelist
he uses his experience of people and places, his ^pre-
hension of himself, his love and hate, his “deepest
thoughts, his passing fancies, to draw in one work ^ter
another a picture of life. It can never be more than a
partial one, but if he is fortunate he will succeed in the
end in doing something else; he will draw a complete
picture of himself.

At all events to think thus is a consolation when you
cast your eye over the publishers’ advertisements. When
you read those long lists of books and when you discover
that reviewers have extolled their wit, profundity,
originality and beauty your heart sinks; what chance
have you in comparison with so much genius? The
publishers will tell you that the average life of a novel is
ninety days. It is hard to reconcile yourself to the fact

that a book into which you have put, besides your whole
self, several months of anxious toil, should be read in
three or four hours and after so short a period forgotten.
Though it will do him no good, there is no author so
small-minded as not to have a secret hope that some pai^
at least of his work will survive him for a generation or
two. The belief in posthumous fame fe a harmless vanity
which often reconciles the aifist to the disappointments
and failure of his life. How vinlikely he is to attain it we
see when we look back on the writers who only twenty
years ago seemed assured of immortality. Where are
their readers now? And with the mass of books that are
constantly produced and the ceaseless competition of
those that have lived on, how small is the likelihood that
work that has been once forgotten will ever be again
remembered! There is one very odd, and some may think
very unfair, thing about posterity; it seems to choose the
works to which it gives attention from those of authors
who have been popular in their lifttime. The writers
who delight a clique and never reach the great public will
never delight posterity, for posterity will never hear about
them. It is a consolation to the popular authors who have
had it impressed upon them that their popularity was
sufficient proof of their worthlessness. It may be that
Shakespeare, Scott and Balzac did not write for the minor
sagej>f Chelsea, but it looks as though they did write for.
after ^s. The writer’s only safety is to find his satis-
faction in his own performance. If he can realize that in
the liberation of soul which his work has brought him
and in the pleasure of shaping it in such a way as to satisfy
to some extent at least his sesthetic sense, he is amply
rewarded for his labours, he can afford to be indifferent
to the outcome.

JO

FOR THE disadvantages and dangers of die author’s
calling ate offset by an advantage so great as to make all
its dilficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships,
unimportant. It gives him spiritual freedom. To him

life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the
catharsis, the purging of pity and terror, which Aristotle
tells us is the object of art. For his sins and his follies,
the unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love,
his physical defects, illness, privation, his hopes aban-
doned, his griefs, humiliations, everything is trans-
formed by his power into material and by writing it he
can overcome it. Everytlyng is grist to his mill, from
the glimpse of a face in the strcet^to a war that convulses
the civilized world, from the scent of a rose to the death
of a friend. Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute
into a stanza, a song or a story, and having done this be
rid of it. The artist is the only free man.

Perhaps that is why the world on the whole has had
the profound suspicion of him that we know. It is not
sure that he ran be trusted when he reacts to the common
impulses ot men so unaccountably. And indeed the artist,
to the indignation of mankind, has never felt himself
bound by ordinary standards. Why should he? With
men in general the primary end of thought and action is
to satisfy their needs and preserve their being; but the
artist satisfies his needs and preserves his being by the
pursuit, of art: their pastime is his grim earnest and so
his attitude to life can never be the same as theirs. He
creates his own values. Men think him cynical because
.he does not attach importance to the virtues and Jj not
revolted by the vices that move them. He is not cynical.
But what they call virtue and what they call vice are not
the sort of things that he takes any particular interest in.
They are indifferent elements in the scheme of things out
of which he constructs his own freedom. Of course
common men are quite right to be indignant with him.
But that isn’t going to do him any good. He is in-
corrigible.

p

WTiENy HAVING achieved success as a dramatist, I
determined to devote the rest of my life to play-writing T
reckoned without my host. I was happy, I was pros-

129

peroiis, 1 was busy, my head was full of plays that I
wanted to write; I do not know whether it was that
success did not bring me all I had expected or whether it
was a natural reaction from success: I was but just firmly
established as a popular playwright when I began to be
obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. The
loss of my mother and then the break-t^ of my home, the
wretchedness of my first yeajs at school for which my
French childhood had so ill-prepared me and which my
stammering made so <fifficult, the delight of those easy,
monotonous and exciting days in Heidelberg, when I
first entered upon the intellectual life, the irksomeness
of my few years at the hospital and the thrill of London;
it all came back to me so pressingly, in my sleep, on my
walks, when I was rehearsing plays, when I was at a
party, it became such a burden to me that I made up my
mind that I could only regain my peace by writing it all
down in the form of a novel. I knew it would be a long
one and I wanted to be undisturbed, so I refused the
contracts managers were anxious to give me and tem-
porarily retired from the stage.

I had written a novel on the same themes when, after
taking my medical degrees, I went to Seville. J^uckily
for me Fisher Unwin refused to give me the hundred
pounds I wanted for it and no other publisher would have
it at any price; or I should have lost a subject which I was
then ttSiT young to make proper use of. The manuscript
still exists, but I have not looked at it since I corrected
the typescript; I have no doubt it is very immature. I
was not fer enough away from the events I described to
see them reasonably and I had not had a number of
experiences that later went to enrich the book I finally
wrote. It seems to me that if the writing of this first
novel did not finally repress into my subconscious the
unhappy memories with which it was concerned it is
because the writer is not finally disembarrassed of his
subject till his work is published. When it is d^ivered
to the public, however heedless the public be, it is his
no longer and he is free from the burden that oppressed
him. 1 called my book Beauty from Ashes, wMch is a

1)0

quotation from Isaiah, but finding that this title had
been recently used, I chose instead the tide of one of
the books in Spinoza’s Ethics and called it Of Human
Bondage. It is not an autobiography, but an auto-
biographical novel; fact and fiction are inextricably
mingled; the emodons are my own, but not all the
incidents are relat<id as they happened and some of them
are transferred to my hero ^ot from my own life but from
that of persons wiA whom I was intimate. The book
did for me what I wanted, and when it was issued to the
world (a world in the throes of a terrible war and too
much concerned with its own sufferings to bother with
the adventures of a creature of fiction) I foimd myself
free for ever from those pains and unhappy recollecdons.
I put into it ever3n:hing I then knew and having at last
fimshed it prepared to make a fresh start.

I WAS dred. I was drrd not only of the people and
thoughts that had so long occupied me; I was tired of the
people I lived with and the life I was leading. I felt that
I had gpt all that I was capable of getting out of the world
in which I had been moving; my success as a playwright
and the luxurious existence it had brought me; the social
k round, the grand dinners at the houses of the great, the
brilliant balls and the week-end parties at country nouses;
the company of clever and brilliant people, writers,
painters, actors; the love affairs I had had and the easy
companionship of my friends; the comfortableness and
security of life. It was stifling me and I hankered after a
different mode of existence and new experiences. But I
did not know where to turn for them. I thought of
travelling. I was tired of the man I was, and it seemed to
me that by a long journey to some far distant country I
might renew myself. Russia was very much in the
thoughts of people then and I had a mind to go there for
a year, learn the language of which I already knew the
elements and immerse myself in the emotion and mystery
of that vast country. I thought that there perhaps I

tji

might find something that would give sustenance and
enrichment to my spirit. I was forty. Ifl meant to marry
and have children it was high time I did so and for some
time I had amused my imagination with pictures of
myself in the married state. There was no one I par-
ticularly wanted to marry. It was the condition that
attracted me. It seemed a necessary rilotif in the pattern
of life that I had designed, anc^to my ingenuous fancy (for
though no longer youqg and thinking myself so worldly
wise, I was stiU in many ways incredibly naive) it offered
peace; peace from the disturbance of love affairs, casual
it might be in the beginning, but bringing in their train
such troublesome complications (for it stakes two to
make a love affair and a man's meat is too often a woman's
poison); peace that would enable me to write all I wanted
to write without the loss of precious time or disturbance
of mind; peace and a settled and dignified way of life.
I sought freedom and thought I could find it in marriage.
I conceived these notions when I wUs still at work on
Of Human Bondage, and turning my wishes into fiction,
as writers will, towards the end of it I drew a picture of
the marriage I should have liked to make. Readers on the
whole have found it the least satisfactory part# of my
book.

But my uncertainties were resolved by an event over
which I had no control. The war broke out. A chapter of
my lifehad finished. A new chapter began.

I HAD a friend who was a cabinet minister and I wrote
and asked him to help me to do something, whereupon
I was invited to present myself at the War Office; but
fearing that I should be set to clerical work in England
and anxious to get out to France at once 1 joined a unit
of ambulance cars. Though I do not think I was less
patriotic than another my patriotism was mingled with
the exciicment the new experience offered me and I began
keeping a note-book the moment I landed in France. I
kept it till the work got heavy and then at the end of the

day I was too tired to do anything but go to bed. I
enjoyed the new life 1 was thrown into and the lack of
responsibility. It was a pleasure to me who had never
been ordered about since I was at school to be told to do
this and that and when it was done to feel that my time
was my own. As a writer I had never felt that; I had felt
on the contrary that I had not a minute to lose. Now
with a clear conscience I ^^sted long hours at estaminets
in idle chatter. I liked meeting ^a host of people, and,
though writing no longer, I treasured theit peculiarities
in my memory. I was never in any particular danger. I
was anxious to see how I should feel when exposed to it;
I have never thought myself very courageous nor did I
think there was any necessity for me to be so. The only
occasion upon which I might have examined myself was
when in the Grande Place at Ypres a shell blew up a wall
against wmcu i had been standing just as 1 had moved
over to get a view of the ruined Cloth Makers flail from
the other side; but4 was too much surprised to observe
my state of mind.

Later on I joined the IntelUgence Department where
it looked as though I could be more useful than in some-
what ipadequately driving an ambulance. The work
appealed both to my sense of romance and my sense of
the ridiculous. The methods I was instructed to use in
^order to foil persons who were following me; the^ecret
interviews with agents in unlikely places; the conveying
of messages in a mysterious fashion; the reports smuggled
over a frontier; it was all doubtless very necessary but
so reminiscent of what was then known as the slulling
shocker that for me it took most of its reality away from
the war and I could not but look upon it as little more than
material that might one day be of use to me. But it was
so hackneyed that I doubted whether I should ever be
able to profit by it. After a year in Switzerland my work
there came to an end. It had entailed a good deal of
exposure, the winter was bitter and I had to take journeys
across the Lake of Geneva in all weathers. I was in
very poor health. There seemed nothing much for me
to do at the moment, so I went to America where two

of my plays were about to be produced. I wanted to
recover my peace of mind shattered through my own
foolislincss and vanity by occurrences upon which I
need not dwell and so made up my mind to go to the
South Seas. I had wanted to go ever since as a youth
I had read The Ebb-Tide and The Wrecker and I wanted
besides to get material for a novel I had long been think-
ing over based on the life of l^aul Gauguin.

I went, looking for beauty and romance and glad to
put a great ocean between me and the trouble that
harassed me. I found beauty and romance, but I found
also something I had never expected. I found a new self.
Ever since I left St. Thomas’s Hospital I had lived with
people who attached value to culture. I had come to
think that there was nothing in the world more im-
portant than art. I looked for a meaning in the universe
and the only one I could find was the beauty that men
here and there produced. On the surface my hfe was
varied and exciting; but beneath it was narrow. Now I
entered a new world, and all the instinct in me of a
novelist went out with exhilaration to absorb the
novelty. It was not only the beauty of the islands that
took me, Herman Melville and Pierre Loti bad p/epared
me for that, and though it is a different beauty it is not a
greater bcayty than that of Greece or Southern Italy;
nor was it their ramshackle, slightly adventurous, easy/
life; ^at excited me was to meet one person after another
who was new to me. I was like a naturalist who comes
into a country where the fauna are of an unimaginable
variety. Some I recognized; they were old types that I
had read of and they gave me just the same feeUng of
delighted surprise that I had once in the Malayan Archi-
pelago when I saw sitting on the branch of a tree a
bird that I had never seen before but in a zoo. For the
first moment I thought it must have escaped from a
cage. Others were strange to me and they thrille^ me as
Wallace was thrilled when he came upon a new Spfecies.

I found them easy to get on with. They were of all sorts;
indeed, the variety would have been bewildering but
that my powers of observation were by now well trained

and I found it possible without conscious efibtt to
pigeon-hole each one in m3r awareness. Few of them had
culture. They had learnt life in a different school from
mine and had come to different conclusions. They led
it on a different plane; I could not, with my sense of
humour, go on thinking mine a higher one. It was
different. Their lives too formed themselves to the
discerning eye into a patt<^ that had order and finally
coherence.

I stepped off my pedestal. It seemed to me that these
men had more vitality than those I had known hitherto.
They did not burn with a hard, gem-like flame, but
with a hot, smoky, consuming fire. They had their own
narrownesses. They had their prejudices. They were
often dull and stupid. I did not care. They were different.
In civilized communities men’s idiosyncrasies are miti-
gated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of
behaviour. Culture is a mask that hides their faces.
Here people should themselves bare. These hetero-
geneous creatures thrown into a life that had preserved a
great deal of its primitiveness had never felt the need
to adapt themselves to conventional standards. Their
peculiarities had been given opportunity to develop
unchecked. In great cities men are like a lot of stones
thrown together in a bag; their jagged corners are rubbed
>off till in the end they are as smooth as marbles. These
men had never had their jagged corners rubbed away.
They seemed to me nearer to the elementals of human
nature than any of the people I had been living with for
so long and my heart leapt towards them as it had done
years before to the people who filed into the out-
patients’ room at St. TTiomas’s. • I filled my note-book
with brief descriptions of their appearance and their
character, and presently, my imagination excited by
these multitudinous impressions, from a hint or an
incident or a happy invention, stories began to form
themselves round certain of the most vivid of them.

J4

I RETURNED to America and shortly afterwards was
sent on a mission to Petrograd. I was diffident of accept-
ing the post, which seemed to demand capacities that I
did not think I possessed; but there seemed to be no one
more competent available at, the moment and my being
a writer was very goqd ‘cover* for what I was asked to
do. I was not very well, I still knew enough medicine
to guess the meaning of the haemorrhages I was having.
An X-ray photograph showed clearly that I had tuber-
culosis of the lungs. But I could not miss the oppor-
tunity of spending certainly a considerable time in the
country of Tolstoi, Dostoievski and Chekov; I had a
notion that in the intervals of the work I was being
sent to do I could get something for myself that would
be of value; so I set my foot hard on the loud pedal of
patriotism and persuaded the physician I consulted
that under the tragic circumstances of the moment I
was taking no undue risk. I set off in high spirits with
unlimited money at my disposal and four devoted
Gsechs to act as liaison officers between me and Professor
Masaryk who had under his control in various parts
of Russia something like sixty thousand of his com-
patriots. I was ejffiilarated by the responsibility of
my position, I went as a private agent, who could be
disavowed if necessary, with instructions to get in touch
with parties hostile to the government and devise a
scheme that would keep Russia in the war and prevent
the Bolsheviks, supported by the Central Powers, from
seixing power. It is -not necessary for me to inform
the reader that in this I failed lamentably and I do not
ask him to believe me when I state that it seenxs to me
at least possible that if I had been sent six months
before I might quite well have succeeded. Three months
after my arrival in Petrograd the crash came and put an
end to all my plans.

1 returned to England. I had had some interesting
experiences and had got to know fairly well one of the

1)6

most extraordinary men I have ever met. This was Boris
Savinkov, the terrorist who had assassinated Trepov and
the Grand Duke Sergius. But I came away disillusioned.
The endless talk when action was needed, the vacilla-
tions, the apathy when apathy could only result in
destruction, the high-flown protestations, the insincerity
and half-heartednes^ that I found everywhere sickened me
with Russia and the Russians. I also came back very ill
indeed, for in the position I was m I could not profit by
the abundant supplies that made it possible for the em-
bassies to serve their countries on a full stomach and I was
(like the Russians themselves) reduced to a meagre diet.
(When I arrived in Stockholm, where I had a day to wait
for the destroyer that was to take me across the North
Sea, I went into a confectioner’s, bought a pound of
chocolates them in the street.) A scheme to send

me to Rumania in connection with some Polish intrigue,
the details of which I now forget, fell through. I was not
sorry, for I was coughing my head off and constant fever
made my nights very uncomfortable. I went to see the
most eminent specialist I could find in London. He
packed me off to a sanatorium in the North of Scotland,
Davos and St. Moritz at that time being inconvenient to
go to, and for the next two years I led an invalid life.

I had a grand time. I discovered for the first time in
my life how very delightful it is to lie in bed. It is
astonishing how varied life can be when you stay in bed
all day and how much you find to do. I delighted in the
privacy of my room with the immense window wide
open to the starry winter night. It gave me a delicious
sense of security, aloofness and freedom. The silence was
enchanting. In^te space seemdi to enter it and my
spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any
adventure. My imagination was never more nimble; it
was like a barque under press of sail scudding before the
breeze. The monotonous days, whose only excitement
was the books I read and my reflections, passed with
inconceivable rapidity. I left my bed with a pang.

It was a strange world that I entered when I grew
well enough to mix during part of the day with my

137

Tub Summxnq Up. K

fellow-patients. In their diiffistent ways these people,
some of whom had been in the sanatorium for years,
were as singular as any of those I had met in the South
Seas. Illness and the queer, sheltered life affected them
strangely, twisting, strengthening, deteriorating their
character just as in Samoa or Tahiti it was deteriorated,
strengthened or twisted by the lan^orous climate and
the alien environment. I thirk I learnt a good deal about
human nature in that sanatorium that otherwise I should
never have known.

JJ

WHEN I recovered from my illness the war was over. I
went to China. I went with the feelings of any traveller
Interested in art and curious to see wmt he could of the
manners of a strange people whose civilisation was of
great antiquity; but I went also with the notion that 1
must surely run across men of '(^ious sorts whose
acquaintance would enlarge my esqserience. I did. I
filled note-books with descriptions of places and persons
and the stories they suggested. I became aware of the
specific benefit I was capable of getting from travel;
before, it had been only an instinctive feeling. This was
freedom of the spirit on the one hand, and on the other,
the collection of all manner of persons who might serve
my purposes. After that I travelled to many countries.
I journeyed over a dozen seas, in Imets, in tramps, in
sdxooners; I went by train, by car, by chair, on foot or
on horseback. I kept my eyes open for character, oddness
and personality. 1 learnt very quickly when a place
promised me something and then I waited till I had got
it. Otherwise I passed on. I accepted every experience
that came my way. When I could I travelled as com-
fortably as my ample means allowed, for it feemed to
me merely silly to rough it for the sake of roughing it;
but I do not think I ever hesitated to do an 3 rthu!|[g because
it was uncomfortable or dangerous.

1 have never been much of a sight-seer. So much
enthusiasm has been expended over the great sights of

rjt

the world that I can summon up very little when I am
confronted with them. 1 have preferred common things,
a wooden house on piles nestling among fruit-trees, the
bend of a little bay lined with coconuts, or a group of
bamboos by the wayside. My interest h^ been in men
and the lives they led. I am shy of making acquaintance
with strangers, but { was fortunate enough to have on my
)oume 3 rs a companion wly had an inestimable socid
gift. He had an amiability of dispc^ition that enabled him
in a very short time to make friends with people in ships,
clubs, bar-rooms and hotels, so that through him I was
able to get into easy contact with an immense number of
persons whom otherwise I should have known only from
a distance.

1 made acquamtance with them with just the degree
of intimacy that suited me. It was an intimacy bom on
their side of ennui or loneliness, that withheld few
secrets, but one that separation irrevocably broke. It
was close because ^its limits were settled in advance.
Looking back on that long procession I cannot think of
anyone who had not something to tell me that I was glad
to know. I seemed to myself to develop the sensitiveness
of a phqtographic plate. It did not matter to me if the
picture I formed was true; what mattered was that with
the help of my imagination I could make of each person
I met a plausible harmony. It was the most entrancing
game in which I had ever engaged.

One reads that no one exactly resembles anyone else,
and that every man is unique, and in a way this is true,
but it is a truth easy to exaggerate: in practice men are
very much alike. They are £vided into comparatively
few types. The same circumstances mould them in the
same way. Certain characteristics infer certain others.
You can, like the palaeontologist, reconstruct the animal
from a single bone. The ‘characters* which have been
a popular form of letters since Theophrastus, and the
‘humours* of the seventeenth century, prove that men
sort themselves into a Yew marked categories. Indeed
this is the foundation of realism, which depends for its
attractiveness on recognition. The romantic method

turns its attention to the exceptional; the realistic to the
iisual. The slightly abnormal circumstances in which
men live in the countries where life is primitive or the
environment alien to them, emphasize their ordinariness
so that it gains a character of its own; and when they are
in themselves extraordinary, which of course they some-
times are, the want of the usual restraints permits them
to develop their kinks with a freedom that in mote
civilized communities can be but hardly won. Then
you have creatures that realism can hardly cope with-
I used to stay away till my receptivity was odiausted and
I found that when I met people I had no longer the power
to make the imaginative effort to give them shape and
coherence; then I returned to England to sort out my
impressions and rest till I felt my powers of assimilation
restored. At last, after seven, I think, of these long
joumejrs 1 found a certain sameness in people. I met more
and more often types that I had met before. They ceased
to interest me so much. 1 concluded that I had come to
the end of my capacity for seeing with passion and
individuality the people I went so far to find, for I had
never doubted that it was 1 who gave them the idiosyn-
crasy that I discovered in them, and so I decided (hat
there was no further profit for me in travel. I had twice
nearly died of fever, I had been neatly drowned, I had
been shot at by bandits. I was glad to resume a more
ordered way of life.

I came back from each of my journeys a little differ-
ent. In my youth I had read a great deal, not because I
supposed that it would benefit me, but from curiosity and
the desire to learn; 1 travelled because it amused me, and
to get material that vould be of use to me: it never
occurred to me that my new experiences were having an
effect on me, and it was not till long afterwards that I saw
how they had formed my character. In contadt with all
these strange people I lost the smoothness that I had
acquired when, leading the humdrum life of a man of
letters, 1 was one of the stones m a bag. I got back my
ja^ed edges. I was at last myself. I ceased to travel
because I felt that travel could give me nothing more. I

140

was capable of no new development. I had sloughed the
arrogance of culture. My mood was complete accept-
ance. 1 asked from nobody more than he could give me.
I had learnt toleration. I was pleased with the goodness
of my fellows; I was not distressed by their badness. I
had acquired independence of spirit. I had learnt to go
my own way without bothering with what others thought
about it. I demanded fre|dom for myself and I was
prepared to give freedom to oth^s. It is easy to laugh
and shrug your shoulders when people act badly to
others; it is much more difficult when they act badly to
you, I have not found it impossible. The conclusion I
came to about men I put into the mouth of a man 1 met
on board ship in the China Seas. T’ll give you my
opinion of the human race in a nutshell, brother,’ I made
him say. ‘T1 vii heart’s in the right place, but theic head
is a thoroughly inefficient organ.’

I HAVE always liked to let things simmer in my mind
for a long time before setting them down on paper, and it
was not till four years after I had made my notes for it that
I wrote the first of the stories I had conceived in the South
Seas. I had not written short stories for many years. I
began my literary career by writing them and my third
book was a collection of six. They were not good.
After that I tried now and then to write stories for the
magazines; my agents pressed me to write humoroitsly,
but for this I had no aptitude; I was grim, indignant or
satirical. My efforts to satisfy editors and thus earn a
little money rarely succeeded. The first story I wrote
now was c^ed Rain and it looked for a while as though
I should have no better luck with it than with those I had
written in my youth, for editor after editor refused it;
but I no longer minded and I went on. When I had
written six, all of which eventually found their way into
magazines, I published &cm in a book. The success they
had was pleasant and unexpected. 1 liked the form. It
was very agreeable to live with the personages of my

Bmcy for two or three weeks and then be done with
them. One had no time to grow sick of them as one easily
may during the months one has to spend in their company
when writing a novel. This sort of story, one of about
twelve thousand words, gave me ample room to develop
my theme, but forced upon me a concision that my
practice as a dramatist had made grateful to me.

It was unlucky for me that I set about writing short
stories seriously whei^the bmer-class writers in England
and America were delivered over to the influence of
Chekov. The literary world somewhat lacks balance, and
when a fluicy takes it, is apt to regard it not as a passing
^hion, but as Heaven’s first law; and the notion pre-
vailed that anyone who had artistic leanings and wanted
to write short stories must write stories like Chekov.
Several writers transplanted Russian melancholy, Russian
mysticism, Russian fecklessness, Russian despair, Russian
futility, Russian infirmity of piirpose, to Surrey or
Michigan, Brooklyn or OaphW tand made quite a
reputation for themselves. It must be admitted that
Chekov is not hard to imitate. As I know to my cost
there are ddzens of Russian refugees who do it quite well:
to my cost, because they send me their stories ^o that I
may correct the English and then are oflended with me
when I cannot get vast sums of money for them from
American magazines. Chekov was a very good short
story writer, but he had his limitations and he very wisely
made them the basis of his art. He had no gift for devising
a compact, dramatic story, such a story as you could teU
with effect over the dinner-table, like L’H^ritage or La
Parure. As a man, he seems to have been of a cheerful and
practical disposition, but as a writer, he of a depressed
melancholic nature that made him turn away with
distaste from violent action or exuberance. Hi$ humour,
often so painful, is the exasperated reaction of a man
whose shuddering sensibilities have been nibbed the
wrong way. He saw life in a monotone. His people
are not sharply individualized.* He does not seem to
have been mu(^ interested in them as persons. Perhaps
that is why he is able to give you the feeling that they are

all part of one another, strange groping ectoplasms that
melt into each other, the sense of the mystery of life
and its futility, which give him his unique quality. It is
a quality that has escaped his followers.

I do not know if I could ever have written stories in
the Chekov manner. I did not want to. I wanted to
write stories that proceeded, tightly knit, in an unbroken
line from the exposition to the conclusion. 1 saw the
short story as a narrative if a single event, material or
spiritual, to which by the elimination of everything that
was not essential to its elucidation a dramatic unity could
be given. I had no feat of what is technically known as
‘the point.’ It, seemed to me that it was reprehensible
only if it was not logical, and 1 thought that the discredit
that had been attached to it was due only to the fact that
it had been often tacked on, merely for effect, with-
out legitimate reason. In short, I preferred to end my
short stories with a full-stop rather than with a straggle
of dots.

It is this, I imagine, that has led to their being better
appreciated in France than in England. Our great novels
are shapeless and unwieldy. It has pleased the English to
lose themselves in these huge, straggling, intimate works;
^d this* laxity of construction, this haphazard conduct of
a rambling story, this wandering in and out of curious
characters who have nothing much to do with the theme,
have given them a peculiar sense of reahty. It is this,
however, that has given the French an acute sense of
discomfort. The sermons that Henry James preached to
the English on form in the novel aroused their interest,
but have little affected their practice. The fact is that they
ate suspicious of form. They find in it a sort of airless-
ness; its constraint irks them; they feel that when the
author has fixed upon his matedd a wilful shape life
has slipped through his fingers. The French critic
demands that a piece of fiction should have a beginning,
a middle and an end; a theme that is clearly developed to
a logical conclusion; arid that it should tell you all that is
of moment to the point at issue. From me familiarity
with Maupassant that I gained at an early age, from

H3

my training as a dramatist, and perhaps from personal
idiosyncrasy, I have, it may be, acquired a sense of form
that is pleasing to the French. At all events they find
me neidier sentimental nor verbose.

J7

IT IS very seldom that life provides the writer with a
ready-made story. Faqfs Indeed ate often very tiresome.
They will give a suggestion that excites the imagination,
but then are apt to exercise an authority that is only
pernicious. The classic example of this is to be found in
Le Rouge et le Noir. This is a very great .novel, but it is
generally acknowledged that the end is xmsatisfactoty.
The reason is not hard to find. Stendhal got the idea for
it from an incident that at the time made a great stir: a
young seminarist killed his mistress, was tried and
guillotined. But Stendhal put into Julien Sorel, his hero,
not only a great deal of himself, but much mote of what
he would have liked to be and was miserably conscious
that he was not; he created one of the most interesting
personages Of fiction and for fully three quarters of his
book made him behave with coherence and probability;
but then he found himself forced to return to the fects
that had been his inspiration. He could only do this by
causing his hero to act incongruously with his character
and his intelligence. The shock is so great that you
no longer believe, and when you do not believe in a
novel you arc no longer held. The moral is that you
mtist have the courage to throw your facts overboard
if they fail to comply with the logic of your character.
I do not know how Stendhal could have ended his
novel; but I think it would have been hard to find a
more unsatisfactory end than the one he chose.

I have been blamed because 1 have drawn my charac-
ters from living persons, and from criticisms thkt I have
read me might suppose that nobody had ever done this
before. That is nonsense. It is* the universal custom.
From the beginning of literature authors have had
originals for their creations. Scholars, 1 believe, give

*44

a name to the rich glutton who setved as a model to
Pettonius for his Ttimalchio and Shakespearean students
find an original for Mr. Justice Shallow. The ve^
virtuous and upright Scott drew a bitter portrait of his
&ther in one book and a pleasanter one, when the
passage of years had softened his asperity, in another.
Stendhal, in one «of his manuscripts, has written the
names of the persons who Jbad suggested his characters;
Dickens, as we all know,* portrayed his father in Mr.
Micawber and Leigh Hunt in Harold Skimpole. Tur-
genev stated that he could not create a character at all
unless as a starting point he could fix his imagination on
a living person. 1 suspect that the writers who deny that
they use actual persons deceive themselves (which is
not impossible, since you can be a very good novelist
without bcLig very intelligent) or deceive us. When
they tell the truth and have in fact had no particular
person in mind, it will be found, I think, that they owe
their characters rariier to their memory than to their
creative instinct. How many times have we met
d’Artagnan, Mrs. Proudie, Archdeacon Grantley, Jane
Eyre and Jerome G>ignard with other names and in
o^er d/cssl I should say that the practice of drawing
characters from actual models is not only universal but
necessary. I do not see why any writer should be ashamed
to acknowledge it. As Turgenev said, it is only if you
have a definite person in your mind that you can give
vitality and idiosyncrasy to your own creation.

I insist that it is a creation. We know very little even
of the persons we know most intimately; we do not
know them enough to transfer them to ^e pages of a
book and make human beings of them. vPeople are too
elusive, too shadowy, to be copied; and they are also
too incoherent and contradictory. *1116 writer does not
copy his originals; he takes what he wants from them, a
few traits that- have caught his attention, a turn of mind
that has fired his imagination, and therefrom constructs
his character. He is ndl; concerned whether it is a truth-
ful likeness; he is concerned only to create a plausible
harmony convenient for his own purposes. So different

W

may be die finished product from the original that it
must be a common expmence of authors to be accused
of having drawn a life-like portrait of a certain person
when they had in mind someone quite different. Further,
it is just chance whether the author chooses his models
from persons with whom he is intimately connected or
not. It is often enough for him to have caught a glimpse
of someone in a tea-shop or chatted widi him for a
quarter of an hour ii:||a ship’s smoking-room. All he
needs is that tiny, fertile substratum wmch he can then
build up by means of his experience of life, his knowledge
human nature and his native intuidon.

The whole business would be plain-sailing if it were
not for the suscepdbilities of the persbns who serve as
models for the author’s characters. So colossal is human
egodsm that people who have met an author are con-
standy on the look out for portraits of themselves in
his works and if they can persuade themselves that such
and such a character is drawn from tlsem they are bitterly
affironted if it is drawn with any imperfecdons. Though
they will find fault with their friends freely and ridicule
their absurdides, their vanity is so outrageous that they
cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that t^ey too
have faults and absurdides. The matter is made worse
for them by their friends who with malicious indignadon
offer them feigned sympathy for the outrage they have,
suffered. Of course there is a lot of humbug about it
all. I do not suppose I am the only author who has
been vilified by women who claimed that I had stayed
with them and abused their hospitality by wddng about
them when not only had I not stayed with them, but
neither knew nor had ever heard of them. The poor
drabs were so vain and their lives so empty that they
deliberately identified themselves with a cr<(ature of
odious character in order in some small circle to give
themselves a petty notoriety. >

Sometimes the author takes a very compionplace
person and from him invents a tharacter who is noble,
self-controlled and courageous. He has seen in that
person a significance that had escaped those he lived with.

Then oddly enough the original goes unrecognized; it
is only when you shew somebody with faults or ridiculous
foibles that a name is at once assigned. I have been
forced to conclude from this that we know our friends
by their defects rather than by their merits. The author
seldom has the wish to give offence and he uses what
means he can to protect his originals; he puts the persons
of his invention in different places, gives them another
means of livelihood, situates them perhaps in a diderent
class; what he cannot so easily do is to change their
appearance. The physical traits of a man influence his
cWacter and contrariwise his character is expressed, at
least in the rough, in his appearance. You cannot make a
tall man short and otherwise keep him the same. A man’s
height gives him a different outlook on his environment
and so chai.gv.s his character. Nor to cover your tracks
can you make a little brunette into a massive blonde. You
have to leave them very much as they are or you will lose
what it was that mo^ed you to draw a character from them.
But no one has the right to take a character in a book and
say, this is meant for me. All he may say is, 1 provided the
suggestion for this character. If he has any common
sense he will be interested rather than vexed; and the
author’s inventiveness and intuition may suggest to him
things about himself that it is useful for him to know.

JS

I HAVE no illusions about my literary position. There
are but two important critics in my own country who
have troubled to take me seriously and when clever young
men write essays about contemporary fiction they never
think of considering me. I do not resent it. It is very
natural. 1 have never been a propagandist. The reading
public has enormously increased during the last thirty
years and there is a large mass of ignorant people who
want knowledge that can be acquired with little labour.
They have thought tmt they were learning something
when they read novels in wbuch the characters delivered
their views on the burning topics of tbe day. A bit of

>47

love-making thrown in here and there made the informa-
tion they were given sufficiently palatable. The novel
was regarded as a convenient pulpit for the dissemination
of ideas and a good many novelists were willing enough
to look upon themselves as leaders of thought. Ihe
novels they wrote were journalism rather thw fiction.
They had a news value. Their disadvantage was that
after a little while they were |s unreadable as last week’s
paper. But the demandtof this great new public for know-
ledge has of late given rise to the production of a number
of books in which subjects of common interest, science,
education, social welfare and I know not what, are treated
in non-technical language. Their success'has been very
great and has killed the propaganda novel. But it is
evident that while its vogue lasted it seemed much more
significant and so offered a better subject of discoiirse
than the novel of character or adventure.

The intelligent critics, the more serious novel
readers, have since then given most s£ their attention to
the writers who seemed to offer something new in tech-
nique, and this is very comprehensible, for the novelties
they presented gave a sort of freshness to well-worn
material and were a fruitful matter of discussion..

It seems strange that so much attention has been
paid to thfese things. The method that Henry James
devised and brought to a high degree of perfection of
telling his story tfcough the sensibilities of an observer
who had some part in its action was an ingenious dodge
that gave the dramatic effect he sought in fiction, a
verisimilitude grateful to an author much influenced by
the French naturalists and a means of getting round
some of the difficulties'of the novelist who takes up the
attitude of an all-seeing and all-wise narrator. What this
observer did not know could be left conveniently
mysterious. It was, however, only a slight variation
from the autobiographical form tlut has many of the
same advantages, and to speak o^ it as though it were a
great aesthetic discovery is somewhat absurd. Of the
other experiments that have been made the most impor-
tant is (he use of the stream of thought. Writers have

14S

always been atttacted by the philosophers who had an
emotional value and who were not too hard to under-
stand. They were taken in turn by Schopenhauer,
Nietasche and Bergson. It was inevitable that psycho-
analysis should captivate their fancy. It had great possi-
bilities for the novelist. He knew how much he owed to
his own subconscious for the best of what he wrote and it
was tempting to explore grater depths of character by an
imaginative picture of the'subcoasdous of the persons
of his invention. It was a clever and amusing trick, but
nothing more. When writers, instead of using it as an
occasional device for a particular purpose, ironical,
dramatic or explanatory, made it the basis of their work
it proved tedious. I conjecture that what is useful in
this and similar devices will be absorbed into the general
techniqu_ oi‘ j 1« tion, but that the works that introduced
them will soon lose their interest. It seems to have
escaped the attention of those who have been taken by
these curious experiments that the matter treated of in
the books in which they are made use of is of an extreme
triviality. It almost looks as though their authors had
been driven to these contrivances by an uneasy con-
sdousn^ of thdr own emptiness. The persons they
describe with all this ingenuity are intrinsically un-
interesting and the subjects at issue unimportant. This
might be expected. For the artist is absorbed by his
technique only when his theme is of no pressing interest
to him. When he is obsessed by his topic he has not
much time over to think of the artfulness of his presen-
tation. So in due seventeenth century the writers, ex-
hausted by the mental effort of the Renaissance and
prevented by the tyranny of kings and the domination
of the church from occupying themselves with the great
issues of hfe, turned their minds to gongorism, con-
rettism and such-like toys. It may be that the interest
that has been taken during recent years in every form
of technical experiment in the arts points to the fact
that our dvilisation is crumbling; dxt subjects that
seemed important to the nineteenth century have lost
their interest, and artists do not yet see what the great

^49

issues are that will affect the generation who will create
tihe civilisation which is in course of displacing our
own.

J9

I LOOK upon it as very natural then that the world of
letters should have attached ,oo great importance to my
work. In the drama 1 have mund myself at home in the
traditional moulds. As a writer of fiction 1 go back,
through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales
round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men.
I have had some sort of story to tell and k has interested
me to tell it. To me it has been a sufficient object in
itself. It has been my misfortune that for some time now
a story has been despised by the intelligent. I have read
a good many books on the art of fiction and all ascribe
very small value to the plot. (In passing I should like to
say that I cannot understand the sharp distinction some
clever theorists make between story and plot. A plot
is merely the pattern on which the story is arranged.)
From these books you would judge that it is only a
hindrance to the intelligent author and a concession
that he qiakes to the stupid demands of the public.
Indeed, sometimes you might think that the best novelist
is the essayist, and that die only perfect short stories
have been written by Charles Lamb and Hazlitt.

But the delight in listening to stories is as natural to
human nature as the delight in looking at the dancing
and miming out of which drama arose. That it exists
unimpaired is shown by the vogue of the detective novel.
The most intellectual j^rsons read them, wifJi condes-
cension of course, but they read them, and why, if not
because the psychological, the pedagogic, the psycho-
analytic novels which alone their minds apprcfve do not
give them the satisfaction of this particular netd? There
are a number of clever writers whp, with all sorts of good
things in their heads to say and a gift for creating living
people, do not know what on earth to do with them
when they have created them. They cannot invent a

IJO

plausible story. Like all writers (and in all writers there
is a certain amount of humbug) they make a merit of
their limitations and either tell the reader that he can
imagine for himself what happens or else berate him for
wanting to know. They claim that in life stories are not
finished, situations are not roimded off and loose ends are
left hanging. Thi^ is not always true, for at least death
finishes all our stories; but |Ten if it were it would not be
a good argument.

For the novelist claims to be an artist and the artist
does not copy life, he makes an arrangement out of it to
suit his own purposes. Just as the painter thinks with his
brush and paints the novelist t^ks with his story;
his view of life, though he may be unconscious of it, lus
personality, exist as a series of human actions. ^X^en
you look ba .k on the art of the past you can hardly &il
to notice that artists have seldom attached great value
to realism. On the whole they have used nature to make a
formal decoration &nd they have only copied it directly
from time to time when their imagination had taken them
so far from it that a return was felt necessary. In painting
and sculpture it might even be argued that a very close
approximation to reality has always announced the
decadence of a school. In the sculpture of Phidias you
see already the dullness of the Apollo Belvedere and in
•Raphael’s Miracle at Bolsano the vapidity of Bouguereau.
Then art can only gain new vigour by forcing on nature
a new convention.

But that is by the way.

It is a natural desire in the reader to want to know
what happens to the people in whom his interest has been
aroused and the plot is the meaits by which you gratify
this desire. A good story is obviously a difficult tlung to
invent, but its difficulty is a poor reason for despising it.
It should have coherence and sufficient probability for
the needs of the theme; it should be of a nature to display
the development of character, which is the chief concern
of fiction at the present day, and it should have complete-
ness, so that when it is finally unfolded no more questions
can be asked about the persons who took part in it. It

///

should have like Aristotle’s tragedy a beginning, a middle
and an end. The chief use of a plot is one that many
people do not seem to have noticed. It is a line to direct
the reader’s interest. That is i^ssibly the most important
thing in fiction, for it is by direction of interest that the
author carries the reader along from page to page and it
is by direction of interest that he induces in him the mood
he desires. The author always loads his dice, but he must
never let the reader see that Ae has done so, and by the
manipulation of his plot he can engage the reader’s
attention so that he does not perceive what violence
has been done him. I am not writing a technical treatise
on the novel, so I need not enumerate the various devices
that novelists have used to achieve this. But how effica-
cious this direction of interest may be and how injurious
its neglect is well shown in Sense and Sensibility and
in L’Education Sentimentale. Jane Austen leads the
reader so firmly along the line of the simple story that
he does not stop to reflect that ElinOi* is a prig, Marianne
a fool, and the three men lifeless dummies. Flaubert,
aiming at a rigid objectivity, directs the reader’s interests
so little that he is perfectly indifferent to the fortunes of
the various characters. This makes the novel very
difficult tp read. I cannot think of another that has so
many merits and leaves so shadowy an impression.

6o

IN MY twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my
thirties they said I was flippant, in my forties they said I
was cynical, in my fifties they said I was competent, and
now in my sixties they^ay I am superficial. I have gone
my way, following the course I had mapped out for
myself, and trying with my works to fill out the pattern
I looked for. 1 think authors are unwise who do not
read criticisms. It is salutary to train oneseljF to be no
more affected by censure than by praise; for of course it
is easy to shrug one’s shoulders ‘when one finds oneself
described as a genius, but not so easy to be unconcerned
when one is treated as a nincompoop. . The history of

//■»

ctidcism is there to show that contemporary criticism
is fallible. It is a nice point to decide how far the author
should consider it and how far ignore it. And such is
the diversity of opinion that it is very dufficult for an
author to arrive at any conclusion about his merit. In
England there is a natural tendency to despise the novel.
The autobiography of an insignificant politician, the life
of a royal courtesan will receive serious critical considera-
tion, whereas half a do2er| novels will be reviewed in a
bunch by a reviewer who is concerned only too often to
be amusing at their expense. The fact is simply that the
English are more interested in works of information
than in works of art. This makes it difficult for the
novelist to get from criticisms of his work anything that
will be useful to his own development.

It is r vreat misfortune to English letters that we
have not had in this century a critic of the class, say, of
Saintc-Bcuve, Matthew Arnold or even Brunetiere. It is
true that he would^not have occupied himself much with
current literature, and if we may judge by the three I
have mentioned, had he done so it would have been of no
direct service to contemporary writers. For Sainte-
Beuve, as we know, was too envious of a form of success
he hankered after, but never achieved, to treat his con-
temporaries with fairness; and Matthew Arnold’s taste
was so much at fault when he dealt with French writers
’ of his day that there is no reason to suppose it would
have been any better if he had dealt with English ones.
Brunetiere had no tolerance; he measured writers by
hard and fast rules and was incapable of seeing merit in
those who had aims with which he did not sympathize.
His force of character gave him an influence that his
talents did not warrant. But notwithstanding, writers
benefit by a critic who is gravely concerned with litera-
ture; even if they resent him they may be incited by
antagonism to a clearer definition of their own aims. He
can provoke in them an excitement that calls them to
more conscious effort and his example urges them to take
their art with a more intense seriousness.

In one of his dialogues Plato seemingly has tried to

TllC SUMHINO UK

show the impossibility of criticism; but in £ict he has only
shown to what extravagance the Socratic method may
sometimes lead. There is one sort of criticism that is
evidently futile. This is that which is written by the critic
to compensate himself for humiliations he has suffered in
his early youth. Criticism affords him a means of regain-
ing his self-esteem. Because at scho9l, unable to adapt
himself to the standards of that naixow world, he Im
been kicked and cuffed, he w'U when grown up cuff and
kick in his turn in order to assuage his wounded feelings.
His interest is in his reaction to the work he is consider-
ing, not in the reaction it has to him.

There can seldom have been a greater need than
now of a critic of authority, for the arts are at sixes and
sevens. We see composers telling stories, painters
philosophizing, and novelists preaching sermons; we
see poets impatient with their own harmony trying to fit
with their verse the other harmony of prose, and we see
the writers of prose trying to force oji it the rhythms of
verse. Someone is badly wanted to define once more the
characters peculiar to the several arts and to point out to
those who go astray that their experiments can lead only
to their own confusion. It is too much to expect that
anyone may be foxmd who can speak with equal com-
petence in all the arts; but, the demand producing the
supply, we may still hope that one of these days a critic
will arise to ascend the throne once occupied by Sainte-
Beuve and Matthew Arnold. He could do much. I have
read lately two or three books in which a claim is made to
form an exact science of criticism. They have not con-
vinced me that such a thing is possible. Qriticism to my
mind is a personal matter, but there is nothing against
that if the critic has a great personality. It is dangerous
for him to look upon his activity as creative. His business
is to guide, to appraise, and to point to new avenues of
creation, but if he looks upon himself as creative he will
be more occupied with creation, the most enthralling of
human activities, than with the functions proper to him.
It is perhaps well for him to have written a phy, a novel
and some verse, for thus as in no other way can he

tJ4

acquire the technique of letters; but he cannot be a great
critic unless he has realize(l that to create is not his a£&it.
One of the reasons why current criticism is so useless is
that it is done as a side-issue by creative writers. It is
only natural that they should think the sort of thing they
do the thing best worth doing. The great critic should
have a sympathy as wide as lus knowledge is universal.
It should be grounded not on a general indifference, sudi
as makes men tolerant of tb^gs they care nothing about,
but on an active delight in diversity. He must be a
psychologist and a physiologist, for he must know how
the basic elements of literature are related to the minds
and bodies of men; and he must be a philosopher, for
from philosophy he will learn serenity, imparti^ty, and
the transitoriness of human things. He must be familiar
not only wli’» lb<* literature of his native land. With
standards founded on the literature of the past, and
studious of contemporary literature in other countries,
he will see clearly the trend that literature in its evolution
is pursuing and so be enabled profitably to direct that of
his own countiymen. He must support himself on
tradition, for tradition is the expression of the inevitable
idiosyncrasies of a nation’s literature, but he must do
everything he can to encourage its development in its
natural direction. Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.
He must have patience, firmness and enthusiasm. Each
book he reads should be a new and thrilling adventure,
he judges it by the universality of his knowledge and the
strengA of his character. In fact the great critic must be
a great man. He must be great enough to recognize with
good-humoured resignation that his work, mough so
important, can have but an epKemeral value; for his
merit is that he responds to the needs of, and points the
way to, his own generation. A new generation arises
wi^ other needs, a new way stretches before it; he has
nothing more to say and is thrown with all his works
into the dust-heap.

To spend his life t& such an end can only be wordi
his while if he thinks literature one of the most im-
portant of humap pursuits.

6i

THAT IS a claim that the author has always made and to
this he has added another claim: he has asserted that he
was not as other men and in consequence not amenable
to their rules. Other men have recer/ed it with obloquy,
derision and contempt. This he has met in different ways
according to his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes he has flaunted
his difference from what he was inclined to call the
common herd by wilful eccentricity and to ipafer le
bourgeois has paraded the red waistcoat of Th6ophilc
Gautier or, like Gerard de Nerval, led a lobster tied by a
pink ribbon down the street; sometimes he has taken an
ironic pleasure in pretending to be the same as every one
else and with Browning has dressed the poet within him
in the likeness of a prosperous banker. It may be that we
are all of us a bundle of mutually contradictory selves,
but the writer, the artist, is deeply Conscious of it. With
other men, the life they lead makes one side of them
predominant, so that, except perhaps in the depths of
the subconscious, it ends by being the whole man. But
the painter, the writer, the saint, is always looking in
himself for new facets; he is bored at repeating himself
and seeks, though it may be without actually knowing it,
to prevent himself from becoming one-sided. He never
gets the opportunity to grow into a self-consistent,
coherent creature.

Other men have been outraged on discovering, as
they so often have, the discrepancy between the artist’s
life and his work. They have not been able to reconcile
Beethoven’s idealisrli with his meanness of spirit,
Wagner’s heavenly rapture with his selfishness and dis-
honesty, Cervantes’ moral obliquity with his tenderness
and magnanimity. Sometimes, in their indignation, they
have sought to persuade themselves that the work of
such men could not possess ^e value they thought.
When it has been brought to their knowledge that great
and pure poets had left behind them a large body of
obscene verse they have been horrified. They have had

an uneasy feeling that the whole thing was a sham.
‘What arrant humbugs th!^e people arel’ they say. But
the point of the writer is that he is not one man but
many. It is because he is many that he can create many
and the measure of his greatness is the number of selves
that he comprises. When he fashions a character that
does not carry conviction it is because there is in himself
nothing of that person; he has had to fall back on observa-
tion, and so has only descrifald, nolkbegotten. vThe writer <
does not feel with; he feels in. It is not sympathy that
he has, that too often results in sentimentality; he has
what the psychologists call empathy. It is because
Shakespeare had this to so great a degree that he was
at once the most Uving and the least sentimental of
authors. I think Goethe was the first writer to grow
conscious ui uuj, multiple personality and it troubled
him all his life. He was always comparing the writer
that he was with the man and he could not quite reconcile
the discongruity. Bat the end of the artist and the end of
other men are different, for the end of the artist is pro-
duction while the end of other men is right action. And
so the artist’s attitude to life is in a certain way peculiar
to himself. Tht psychologists tell us that with the
ordinary man an image is less vivid than a sensation. It
is an attenuated experience that serves to give informa-
tion about objects of sense and in the world of sense is a
guide to action. His day-dreams satisfy emotional needs
and fulfil desires that in the world of affairs are frustrated.
But they are pale shadows of real life and at the back of
his mind is the awareness that the demands of the world
of sense have another validity. To the writer this is not
so. The images, free ideas dut throng his mind, are not
guides but materials for action. They have all the vivid-
ness of sensation. His day-dreams are so significant to
him that it is the world of sense that is shadowy and he
has to reach out for it by an effort of will. His castles in
Spain are no baseless fabric, but real castles that he
lives in.

The artist’s egoism is outrageous: it must be; he is
by nature a solipsist and the world exists only for him to

U7

exetdse upon it his powets of creation. He partakes of
life only with part of him and never feels the common
emotions of men with his whole being, for however
urgent the necessity he is an observer as well as an actor.
It often makes him seem heartless. Women with their
shrewd sense are on the guard against him; they are
attracted by him, but instinctively ■feel that they can
never completely dominate him, which is their desire,
for they know that somehow he escapes them. "Has not
Goethe, that great lover, himself told us how he com-
posed verses in the arms of his beloved and with singing
fingers softly tapped the beat of his hexameters on her
shapely back? The artist is ill to live with. He can be
penectly sincere in his creative emotion and yet there is
someone else within him who is capable of cocking a
snook at its exercise. He is not dependable.

But the gods never make any of their gifts without
adding to them a drawback and this multiplicity of the
writer that enables him, like the gotfs, to create human
beings prevents him from achieving perfect truth in their
creation. ReaUsm is relative. The most realistic writer
by the direction of his interest falsifies his creatures. He
sees them through his own eyes. He makes th^'m more
self-conscious than they really are. He makes them mote
reflective and more complicated. He throws himself
into them, trying to make them ordinary men, but he
never quite succeeds; for the peculiarity that gives him
his talent and makes him a writer for ever prevents him
ftom knowing exactly what ordinary men are. It is not
truth he attains, but merely a transposition of his own
personality. And the greater his talent, the more power-
ful his individuality, (he more fantastic is the picture
of life he draws. It has sometimes seemed to me that if
posterity wants to know what the world of to-day was
like it will not go to those writers whose idiosyncrasy
has impressed our contemporaries, but to the mediocre
ones whose ordinariness has allowed them to describe
dieir surroundings with a greater faithfulness. I do not
mention them since, even though they may be assured of
the appreciation of after ages, people do not Uke to be

labelled as mediocre. Bu{; I think it may be admitted that
one gets the impression of a truer picture of iife in the
nov^ of Anthony Trollope than in those of Charles
Dickens.

6z

SOMETIMES THE writy must ask himself whether
what he has written has any value eXcept to himself and the
question is perhaps urgent now when the world seems,
at least to us who live in it, in such a condition of unrest
and wretchedness as it has not often been in before. For
me the questioh has had a special import for I have never
wished to be nothing but a writer; I have wished to live
life completely. I luve been uneasily conscious that it
was a duty x owed myself to take some part, however
small, in the business of the common weal. My natural
inclination has been to keep aloof from every kind of
public activity and it has been with the greatest reluctance
that I have even served on committees formed to effect
some aim of passing interest. Thinking that not the
whole of life was long enough to learn to write well, I
have been unwilling to give to other activities time that I
so much needed to achieve the purpose I had in mind.
X have never been able intimately to persuade myself that
anything else mattered. Notwidistanding^ when men in
millions are living on the border-line of starvation, when
freedom in great parts of the inhabited globe is dying or
dead, when a terrible war has been succeeded by >cars
during which happiness has been out of the reach of the
great mass of the human race, when men are distraught
because they can see no value in life and the hopes that
had enabled them for so many centuries to support its
misery seem illusory; it is hard not to ask oneself whether
it is an3)thing but futility to write plays and stories and
novels. The only answer I can think of is that some of
us are so made that the|e is nothing else we can do. We
. do not write because we want to; we ‘te because we
must. There may be other things in the world that more
pressingly want«doing: we must liberate our souls of die

burden of creation. We must go on though Rome bums.
Others may despise us because we do not lend a hand
with a bucket of water; we cannot help it; we do not
know how to handle a bucket. Besides, the conflagra-
tion thrills us and charges our mind with phrases.

From time to time, however, writers have engaged in

f olitics. Its effect on them as writers Ixas been injurious.

have not noticed that thfir counsel has had much
influence on the cond&ct of affdrs. The only exception
I can recall is Disraeli; but in his case, it is not unfair to
say, writing was not an end in itself, but a means to
political advancement. At the present day, living as we
do in an age of specialisation, I have a notion that on the
whole the cobbler does best to stick to his last.

Because I had heard that Dryden had learnt to write
English from his study of Tillotson, I read certain
passages of this author and I came across a piece that
gave me some consolation in this matter. It ran as
follows: ‘We ought to be glad, wh«i those that are fit
for government, and called to it, are willing to take the
burden of it upon them; yea, and to be very thankful to
them too, that they will be at the pains, and can have
the patience, to govern and live publicly. Therefore
it is happy for the world that there are some who are
born and bred up to it; and that custom hath made it
easy, or at least tolerable to them. . . . The advantage
whiA men have by a mote devout and retired and
contemplative life, is, that they are not distracted about
many things; their minds and affections are set upon one
thing; and the whole stream and force of their affections
tun one way. All their thoughts and endeavours are
united in one great en’d and design, which makes their
life all of a piece, and to be consistent with itself
throughout.’

WHEN I started this book I uarned the reader that
perhaps the only thing of which I was certain was that
I was certain of nothing else. I was trying to put my

i(o

thoughts on sundty subjects in ordei and I asked no
one to agree with me in my opinions. On revising what
I have written, I have cut out the words, I think, in a
great many places because, though they came to my pen
naturally, I foimd them tedious, but they are to be
understood as qualifying my every statement. And now
that I come to thisf last section of my book, I am con-
strained more anxiously than ever to repeat that what I
give are my own private convictions. It may be that they
are superficial. It may be that some of them are con-
tradictory. It is unlikely that surmises that are the
outcome of thoughts, feelings, and desires built up out
of all sorts oP haphazard experiences and coloured by
a particular personality should fit with the logical
precision of a proposition of Euclid. When I wrote of
the drama ana of fiction I wrote of what by practice I had
some cognizance of, but now that 1 come to deal with
matters of which philosophers treat 1 have no more
special knowledge than can be acquired by any man who
has lived for many years a busy and varied life. Life also
is a school of pliilosophy, but it is like one of those
modern kindergartens in which children are left to their
own devuces and work only at the subjects that arouse
iheir interest. Their attention is drawn to what seems
.to have a meaning for them and they take no notice of
what docs not immediately concern them. In psycho-
logical laboratories rats are trained to find their way
through a maze and presently by trial and error they
learn the path that leads to the food they seek. Ir the
matters with which I now occupy m)rself I am like one of
these tats scurrying along the pathways of the com-
plicated maze, but I do not know that it has a centre
where I shall find what I seek. For all I know all the
alleys ate blind.

I was introduced to philosophy by Kuno Fischer
whose lectures I attended when I was at Heidelberg. He
had a great reputation t]jiere and he was giving that winter
a course of lectures on Schopenhauv «■. They were
crowded and one had to queue up early in order to get a
good seat. He was a dapper, short, stoutish man, neat in

his dcess, with a bxillet head, wMte hair en hrosse and a red
fyct. His litde eyes were qui<^ and shining. He had a
funny, flattened snub nose that looked as if it had been
bashed in, and you would have been much more likely to
take him for an old priae-iighter than for a philosopher.
He was a humorist; he had indeed written a book on
wit which I read at the time, but which I have completely
forgotten, and every now and then a great guffaw broke
from his audience of*studet{bs as he made a joke. His
voice was powerful and he was a vivid, impressive and
exciting speaker. 1 was too young and too ignorant to
understand much of what he said, but I got a very clear
impression of Schopenhauer’s odd and originaJ per-
sonality and a confused feeling of the dramatic value and
the romantic quality of his sjrstem. I hesitate to make
any statement after so many years, but I have a notion
that Kuno Fischer treated it as a work of art rather than
as a serious contribution to metaphysics.

Since then I have read a great dftal of philosophy. I
have found it very good reading. Indeed, of the various
great subjects that afford reading matter to the person
for whom reading is a need and a delight it is the most
varied, the most copious and the most satisfying. .Ancient
Greece is thrilling, but from this point of view there is
not enough in it; a time comes when you have read the.
little that remains of its literature and all of significance
that has been written about it. The Italian Renaissance
is fascinating too, but the subject, comparatively, is small;
the ideas that informed it were few, and you get tired of
its art which has been long since drained of its creative
value so that you are left only with grace, charm and
symmetry (qualities of Which you can have enough) and
you get tired of its men, whose versatility falls into tbo
uniform a pattern. You can go on reading about the
Italian Renaissance for ever, but your interest fail| before
the material is exhausted. The French Revolhtion is
another subject that may well en^ge the attentioti and it
has the advantage that its signmcance is actual. It is
close to us in point of time so that with a veiJy small
effort of imagination we can put ourselvts into me men

ifi

who made it. They ate almost contempotaries. And what
they did and what they tliought affect the lives we lead
to-my; aftet a hishion we ate all descendants of the French
Revolution. And the material is abundant. The docu-
ments that relate to it are countless and the last thing has
never been said about it. You can always find something
firesh and interesting^ to read. But it does not satisfy. The
art and literature it directly produced are negligible, so
that you are driven to the sthdy ofthe men who made it,
and the more you read about them the more are you
dismayed by their pettiness and vulgarity. The actors in
one of the greatest dramas in the world’s history were
pitifully inadeqbate to their parts. You turn away £K>m
the subject at last with a feint disgust.

But metaphysics never lets you down. You can
never come to the end of it. It is as various as the soul of
man. It has greatness, for it deals with nothing less than
the whole of knowledge. It treats of the universe, of
God and immortality, of the properties of human reason
and the end and purpose of hfe, of the power and
limitations of man; and if it cannot answer the questions
that assail him on his journey through this dark and
mysterious world it persuades him to support his
ignorance with good humour. It teaches resignation and
inculcates courage. It appeals to the imagination as well
as to the intelligence; and to the amateur, much more,
I suppose, than to the professional, it affords matter for
that reverie which is the most delicious pleasure with
which man can beguile his idleness.

Since, inspired by Kuno Fischer’s lectures, I began
to read Schopenhauer I have read pretty well all the
most important works of the great classical philosophers.
Though there is in them a great deal tmt I did not
understand, and perhaps I did not even understand as
much as I thought, I have read them with passionate
interest. The only one who has consistently bored me is
Hegel. This is doubtle^ my own fault, for his influence
on philosophical thought during the nineteenth century
proves his importance. I found him terribly long-winded
and I could nev;^ reconcile myself to the jugglery with

163

which it seemed to me he proved whatever he had a
aiind to. Perhaps I was prejudiced against him by the
scorn with which Schopenhauer always spoke of him.
But to the others, from Plato onwards, I surrendered
myself, one after the other, with the pleasure of a traveller
adventuring into an unknown country. I did not read
critically, but as I might have read a novel, for the excite-
ment and delight of it. (I have already confessed that I
read a novel not fo® instruction, but for pleasure. I
crave my reader’s indulgence.) A student of character,
I got an immense amount of pleasure out of the self-
revelation which these various writers offered to my
survey. I saw the man behind his philosophy and I was
exalted by the nobility I found in some and amused by
the queerness I discerned in others. I felt a wonderful
exhilaration when I dizzily followed Plotinus in his flight
from the alone to the alone, and though I have learnt
since that Descartes drew preposterous conclusions from
his effective premiss I was entranced by the lucidity of
his expression. To read him was like swimming in a lake
so clear that you could see the bottom; that crystalline
water was wonderfully refreshing. I look upon my first
reading of Spinoza as one of the signal experiences of my
life. It filled me with just that feeling of majesty and
exulting power that one has at the sight of a great
mountain range.

And when I came to the English philosophers, with
perhaps a slight prejudice, for it had been impressed upon
me in Germany that, with the possible exception of
Hume, they were quite negligible and Hume’s only
importance was that Kant had demolished him, I found
that besides being philosophers they were uncommonly
good writers. And though they might not be very great
thinkers, of this I could not presume to judge, they were
certainly very curious men. I should think that few could
read Hobbes’ Leviathan without being taken by the
gruff, downright John Bullishness of his personality and
surely no one could read Berkeley’s Efialogues without
being ravished by the charm of that delightful bishop.
And though it may be true that Kant ma^c hay of Hume’s

164

theories it would be impossible, I think, to write philo-
sophy with more elegance, urbanity and clearness. They
all, and Locke too for the matter of that, wrote English
that the student of style could do much worse than study.
Before I start writing a novel I read Candide over again
so that I may have in the back of my mind the touch-
stone of that luci^jity, grace and wit; I have a notion
that it would not hurt the English philosophers of our
own day if before they set about % work they submitted
themselves to the discipline of reading Hume's Inquiry
Concerning the Human Understanding. For it is not
invariably that they write now with distinction. It may
l)e that their thoughts are so much more subtle than
those of their predecessors that they are obliged to use
a technical vocabulary of their own invention; but it is a
dangerou*? ^^'^durc, and when they deal with matters
that arc of pressing concern to all reflective persons,
one can only regret that they cannot make their meaning
so plain that all whp read may understand. They tell me
that Professor Whitehead has the most ingenious brain
of anyone who is now engaged in philosophic thought.
It seems to me a pity then that he should not always take
pains to make his sense clear. It was a good rule of
Spinoza^s to indicate the nature of things by words whose
customary meanings should not be altogether opposed
'.to the meanings he desired to bestow upon them.

THERE IS no reason why philosophers should not be
also men of letters. But to write well does not come by
instinct; it is an art that demands arduous study. The
philosopher does not speak only to other philosophers
and to undergraduates working for a degree; he speaks
also to the men of letters, politicians and reflective persons
who directly mould the ideas of the coming generation.
They, naturally enough, are taken by a philosophy that
is striking and not tdo difficultly assimilated. We all
know how the philosophy of Nietzsche has affected some
parts of the world and few would assert that its influence

t6j

has been other than disastrous. It has prevailed, not by
such profundity of thought as^t may have, but by a vivid
style and an effective form. The philosopher who will
not take the trouble to make himself clear shows only
that he thinks his thought of no more than academic
value.

It has, however, been a consolat\pn to me to discover
that sometimes even the professional philosophers do not
understand one another. Bradley frequently confesses
that he is at a loss to understand what someone with
whom he is arguing means and Professor Whitehead in
one place states that something Bradley says is beyond
his comprehension. When the most eminent philosophers
cannot always understand one another the layman may
well feel resigned if he often does not understand them.
Of course metaphysics is difficult. One must cicpect that.
The layman walks a tight-rope without a pole to balance
him and he must be thankful if he can scramble somehow
to safety. The feat is exciting enough to make it worth
his while to risk a tumble.

1 was much disconcerted by the claim that I found
here and there advanced that philosophy was the province
of the higher mathematicians; and though It seemed hard
to me to believe that, if knowledge, as the doctrine of
evolution' suggests, has been developed for practical
reasons in the struggle for existence, the sum total of it,
something that is essential to the well-being of man in
general, could be reserved only for a small body of men
who are gifted by nature with a rare faculty, I might very
well have been deterred from pursuing my pleasant studies
in this direction, smce I have no head for mathematics,
if I had not luckily con^e across an admission of Bradley's
that he knew very litde of this abstruse science. And
Bradley was no mean philosopher. We know that the
sense of taste differs in various persons; but without it
men would perish. It seems as unlikely tha*" yo^ may not
hold f-easonable theories about the universe and man’s
place in it, the mystery of evil and the meaning of reality,
unless you are a mathematical physicist, as that you can-
not enjoy a bottle of wine unless you have the trained

sensibility that enables you without error to ascribe a
year to twenty different clarets.

For philosophy is not a subject that has to do only
with philosophers and mathematicians. It is one that
concerns us all. It is true that most of us accept our
opinions on the matters with which it deals at second
hand and most do not know that they have any philo-
sophy at all. But it*is implicit even in the most thought-
less. The old woman who fjest saicj, ‘it’s no good crying
over spilt milk’ was a philosopher m her way. For what
did she mean by this except that regret was useless? A
complete system of philosophy is implied. The deter-
minist thinks that you cannot take a step in life that is
not motivated by what you are at the moment; and you
are not only your muscles, your nerves, your entrails
and your bram* you are your habits, your opinions and
your ideas. However litde you may be aware of them,
however contradictory, unreasonable and prejudiced
they may be, they arg diere, influencing your actions and
reactions. Even if you have never put them into words
they are your philosophy. Perhaps it is well enough that
most people should leave this unformulated. It is hardly
thoughts they have, at least not conscious thoughts, it is
a kind of vague feeling, a sort of experience like that
muscular sense that the physiologists not so long ago
discovered, which they have absorbed from the notions
current in the society in which they live and which has
been faintly modified by their own experience. They
lead their ordered lives and this confused body of ideas
and feelings is enough. Since it includes something of
the wisdom of the ages, it is adequate for the ordinary
purposes of the ordinary Ufc. But ^ have sought to make
a pattern of mine and from an early age tried to find out
what were the elements I had to deal with. I wanted to
get what knowledge I could about the general structure
of the universe; I wanted to make up my mind whether I
had to consider only this life or a life to come; I 'vmited to
discover whether I was aifree agent or whether my feeling
that I could mould myself according to my will was an
illusion; I wanted to know whcdier life had any meaning

t€7

or whether it was I that must strive to give it one. So
in a desultory way I began to tread.

THE FIRST subject that attracted my attention was
religion. For it seemed to me of thp greatest importance
to decide whether this world I lived in was the only one
I had to reckon with-or whether 1 must look upon it as no
more than a place of trial which was to prepare me for a
life to come. When I wrote Of Human Bondage I gave a
chapter to my hero’s loss of the faith in which he had
been brought up. The book was read in typescript by a
very clever woman who at tliat time was good enough
to be interested in me. She told me that this chapter was
inadequate. I rewrote it; but I do not think I much
improved it. For it described my own experience and
I have no doubt that my reasons for coming to the
conclusion I came to were inadequate. They were the
reasons of an ignorant boy. They were of the heart rather
than of the head. When my parents died I went to live
with my uncle who was a clergyman. He was a childless
man of fifty, and I am sure that it was a great nuisance to
have th^ charge of a small boy thrust upon him. He read
prayers morning and evening, and we went to church
twice on Sundays. Sunday was the busy day. My unde
always said that he was the only man in his parish who
worked seven days a week. In point of fact he was
incredibly idle and left the work of his parish to his curate
and his churchwardens. But I was impressionable and
soon became very religious. I accepted what I was
taught, both in my unde’s vicarage and afterwards at
school, with unquestioning trust.

liiere was one point that immediately affected me. I
had not been long at school before I discovered, through
the ridicule to which I was exposed and the humiliations
I suflFered, how great a misfortune it was to me that I
stammered; and I had read in 'the Bible that if you had
faith you could move mountains. My uncle assured me
that it was a literal fact. One night, when I was going

back to school next day, I prayed to God with all my
might that he would take away my impediment; and, such
was my faith, I went to sleep quite certain that when I
awoke next morning I should be able to speak like every-
body else. I pictured to myself the surprise of the boys
(I was still at a preparatory school) when they found that
I no longer stammered. I woke full of exultation and it
was a real, a terrible shock, when I discovered that I
stammered as badly as ever.n ,

I grew older. I went to the King^s School. The
masters were clergymen; they were stupid and irascible.
They were impatient of my stammering and if they did
not ignore me completely, which I preferred, they bullied
me. They seemed to think it was my fault that I stam-
mered. Presently 1 discovered that my uncle was a selfish
man who r^r for nothing but his own comfort. The
neighbouring clergy sometimes came to the vicarage.
One of them was fined in the county court for starving
his cows; another h-^d to resign his living because he was
convicted of drunkenness. I was taught that we lived in
the presence of God and that the chief business of man
was to save his soul. I could not help seeing that none
of these clergymen practised what they preached. Fer-
vent though my faith was, I had been terribly bored by
all the church-going that was forced upon me, both at
home and at school, and on going to Germany I wel-
comed the freedom that enabled me to stay away. But
two or three times out of curiosity I went to High Mass
at the Jesuit Church in Heidelberg. Though my uncle
had a natural sympathy for Catholics (he was a High
Churchman and at election time they painted on the
garden fence, ‘This way to Ronje^), he had no doubt
that they would frizzle in hell. I le believed implicitly in
eternal punishiiicnt. 1 Ic hated the dissenters in his parish
and indeed thought it a monstrous thing that the state
tolerated them. His consolation W3S that they too would
suffer eternal damnation. Heaven was reserved for the
members of the Churcll of England. I arrepted it as a
great mercy of God that I had been bred in that com-
munion. It was as wonderful as being born an Englishman.

169

Ttm imnoJita Va. ai

But when 1 went to Germany I discovered that the
Germans were just as proud <£ being Germans as I was
proud of being English. I heard them say that the
English did not understand music and that Shakespeare
was only appreciated in Germany. They spoke of the
English as a nation of shop-keepers and had no doubt in
their minds that as artists, men of science and philoso-
phers they were greatly superior. It shook me. And now
at High Mass in Hei<MbergcI could not but notice that
the students, who filled the church to its doors, seemed
very devout. They had, indeed, all the appearance of
believing in their religion as sincerely as I believed in
‘ mine. It was queer that they could, for of course I knew
that theirs was false and mine was true. I think I can have
had by nature no strong religious feeling, or else in the
intolerance of my youth I must have been so shocked by
the contrast of the practice with the professions of the
various clergymen with whom I had to do, that I was
already inclined to doubt; otherwise I can hardly think
that such a simple little notion as then occurred to me
couid have lud consequences that were to me of so much
importance. It struck me that I might very well have
been born in South Germany, and then I should naturally
have be^ brought up as a Catholic. I found it very
hard that thus through no fault of my own I should
have been condemned to everlasting torment. My in-
genuous nature revolted at the injustice. The next step
was easy; I came to the conclusion that it could not
matter a tow of pins what one believed; God could not
condemn people just because they were Spaniards or
Hottentots. I might have stopped there and if I had been
less ignorant adopted some form of deism like that which
was current in the eighteenth century. But the beliefs that
had been instilled into me hung together and when one
of them came to seem outrageous the others participated
in its fate. The whole horrible structure, based not on
the love of God but on the feat of Hell, tundiled down
like a house of cards.

With my mind at all events I ceased to believe in
God; I felt the exhilatation of a new freedom. But we do

^70

not believe only vrith out minds; in some deep recess of
my soul there lingered stMl the old dread of hell-iire, and
for long my exultation was tempered by the shadow of
that ancest^ anxiety. I no longer believed in God; I
still, in my bones, believed in the Devil.

66

IT WAS this fear that I sought to banish when, becoming
a medical student, I entered a new world. I read a great
many books. They told me that man was a machine
subject to mechanical laws; and when the machine ran
down that was the end of him. I saw men die at the
hospital and my startled sensibilities confirmed what my
books had taught me. I was satisfied to believe that
religion and ♦he idea of God were constructions that
the human race had evolved as a convenience for living,
and represented something that had at one time, and for
all I was prepared Ho say still had, value for the survival
of the species, but that must be historically explained
and corresponded to nothing real. I called myself an
agnostic, but in my blood and my bones I looked upon
God as a hypothesis that a reasonable man must reject.

But* if there was no God who could consign me to
eternal flames and no soul that could be thus consigned,
if I was the plaything of mechanical forces and the
struggle for life was the impelling force, I could not sec
that Acre was any meaning in good such as I had been
taught it. I began to read lithics. I waded conscien-
tiously through many formidable tomes. I came to Ae
conclusion that man aimed at nothing but his own
pleasure and that when he sacrificed himself for others
it was only an illusion that led him to believe that he
was seeking anything but his own gratification. And
since Ae future was uncertain it was only common sense
to sei2e every pleasure that Ae moment offered. I decided
that right and wrong were merely words and that Ac
rules of conduct were nb more Aan conventions that men
had set up to serve Acir own selfiA purpose?. The free
man had no reason to follow Aem except in so far as they

suited his convenience. Having then an epigtammadc
tutn, and epigrams being the £sGmon, 1 put my conviction
into a phrase and said to myself: follow your inclinations
with due regard to the policeman round the comer.
By die time I was twenty-four I had constructed a com-
plete system of philosophy. It rested on two principles:
The Relarivity of Things and The Qrcumfercntiality of
Man. I have learnt since that the first of these was not a
very original discovery. It onay be that the other was
profound, but though I have racked my brains I cannot
for the life of me remember what on earth it meant.

On a certain occasion I read a litde story that gtcady
took my fimey. It is to be found in one of the volumes
of Anatole France’s La Vie LitnSraire. It is many years
since I read it, but it has remained in my recollection as
follows: a young king of the East, anxious on his ascent
of the throne to rule his kingdom justly, sent for the wise
men of his country and ordered them to gather the
wisdom of the world in books so that he might read them
and learn how best to conduct himself. They went
away and after thirty years returned with a string of
camels laden with five thousand tomes. Here, they told
him, is collected everything that wise men have learnt
of the history and destiny of man. But the king was
immersed in affairs of state and could not read so many
books, so he bade them go and condense tliis knowledge
into a smaller number. Fifteen years later they returned
and their camels carried but five hundred works. In these
volumes, they told the king, you will find all the wisdom
of the world. But there were still too many and the king
sent them away again. Ten years passed and they came
back and now they brought no more than fifty books.
But the king was old and tired. He had no time now even
to read so few and he ordered his wise men once more to
reduce their number and in a single volume give liim an
epitome of human knowledge so that he mig^t learn at
last what it was so important for him to know. They
went away and set to work and in five year$ returned.
They were old men when for the last time the) came and
laid the result of their labours in the king’s hands, but

now the king was dying and he had no time any mote to
tead even the one book tiiey brought him.

It was some such book as this that I sought, a book
that would answer once for all the questions that puzzled
me, so that, everything being settled for good and all, I
could pursue the pattern of my life without let or hin-
drance. I read and*read. From the classical philosophers
I turned to the moderns, thinking that among them,
perhaps, I should find wb2t I wahted. I could not dis-
cover much agreement among them. I found myself
convinced by the critical parts of their works, but when
I came to the constructive, though often I failed to see
the flaws, I could not but be conscious that they did not
compel my assent. The impression suggested itself to me
that notwithstanding their learning, their logic and their
classifications, plulosophers embraced such and such
beliefs not because they were led to them by their reason,
but because their temperaments forced these beliefs upon
them. Otherwise P could not understand how after aU
this time they differed from one another so profoundly.
When I read, I do not know where, that Fichte had said
that the kind of philosophy a man adopts depends on the
kind of man he is, it occurred to me that perhaps I was
looking for something that could not be found. It seemed
.to me then that if there was in philosophy no universal
truth that everyone could accept, but only a truth that
agreed with the personality of the individual, the only
thing for me was to narrow my search and look for some
philosopher whose system suited me because I was the
same sort of man that he was. The answers that he would
provide to the questions that puzzled me must satisfy me
because they would be the only possible answers to fit
my humour.

For some time I was much attracted by the prag-
matists. I had not got as much profit as I expected from
the metaphysical wsitings of the dons at the great English
universities. They scented to me too gentlemanlike to be
very good philosophers and I could no resist the sus-
picion that sometimes they failed to pursue an argument
to its logical conclusion for fear of offending & sus-

ccptibilities of colleagues with whom they were in social
relations. The pragmatists had vigour. They were very
much alive. The most important of them wrote well, and
they gave an appearance of simplicity to problems which
1 had not been able to make head or tail of. But much as
I should have liked to I could not bring m 3 rself to believe',
as they did, that truth is fashioned iby us to meet our
practical needs. The sense-datum, on which I thought all
knowledge was based*’ seemfid to me something given,
which had to be accepted whether it suited the con-
venience or not. Nor did I feel comfortable with the
argument that God existed if it consoled me to believe
that he did. The pragmatists ceased to interest me so
much. I found Bergson good to read, but singularly
unconvincing; nor did I find in Benedetto Croce any-
thing to my purpose. On the other hand, in Bertrand
Russell I discovered a writer who greatly pleased me; he
was easy to understand and his EngUsh was good. I read
him wiA admiration. •

I was very willing to accept him as the guide I
sought. He had worldly wisdom and common sense. He
was tolerant of human weakness. But I ^discovered in
time that he was a guide none too certain of the way. His
mind was orestless. He was like an architect who, when
you want a house to hvc in, having persuaded you to
build it of brick, then sets before you good reasons why
it should be built of stone; but when you have agreed to
this produces reasons just as good to prove that the only
material to use is reinforced concrete. Meanwhile you
have not a roof to your head. I was looking for a system
of philosophy as coherent and self-contained as Bradley^s,
in which one part hung necessarily on another, so that
nothing could be altered without the whole fabric
falling to pieces. This Bertrand Russell could not give me.

At last I came to the conclusion that I could never
find the one, complete and satisfying book I sought,
because that book could only be ^n expression of myself.
So with more courage than discretion I made up my mind
that I must write it for myself. I found out what were the
books set for the undergraduate to read, in order to take

a philosophical degree and laboriously perused them,
I thought I should thus hive at least a foundation for my
own work. It seemed to me that with this, the knowledge
of the world I had acquired during the forty years of my
life (for I was forty when I conceived this idea) and the
industrious study of philosophical literature to which I
was prepared to de^jote some years, I should be competent
to write such a book as I had in mind. I was aware that
except to myself it could llave no value beyond such a
coherent portrait as it might give of the soul (for want of
a more exact word) of a reflective person who had led a
fuller life and been subject to more varied experiences
than generally fall to the lot of professional philosophers.
I knew very well that I had no gift for metaphysical
speculation. I meant to take from here and there theories
that satisfied i only my mind but, what T could not but
think more important than my mind, the whole body of
my instincts, feelings and deep-rooted prejudices, the
prejudices that are sJb intimate a part of one that they can
hardly be distinguished from instincts; and out of them
make a system that would be valid for me and enable me
to pursue the course of my life.

Butjthe more I read the more complicated the subject
seemed to me and the more conscious I grew of my
ignorance. I was peculiarly discouraged by the philo-
sophical magazines in which I found topics discussed at
great length which were evidently of importance but
which seemed to me in my darkness very trivial; and the
manner in which they were handled, the logical apparatus,
the care with which each point was argued and the
possible objections met, the terms which each writer
defined when he first used th(un, the authorities he
quoted proved to me that philosophy, at all events now,
was a business for the experts to deal with between them.
The layman could little hope to comprehend its subtleties.
I should need twenjy years to prepare myself to write the
book I proposed and by the time it was done I might, like
the king in Anatole France's story, be on my death bed
and to me at least the labour I had taken would no longer
be of use.

I abandoned the idea and all I have to show for my
efforts now is the few desultory notes that follow. I claim
no originality for them, or even for the words in which I
have put them. I am like a tramp who has rigged himself
up as best he could with a pair of trousers from a charit-
able &rmer’s wife, a coat off a scarecrow, odd boots
out of a dustbin, and a hat that he hat found in the road.
They are just shreds and patches, but he has fitted himself
into them pretty comfbrtabl/and, uncomely as they may
be, he finds that they suit lum well enough. When he
passes a gentleman in a smart blue suit, a new hat and well-
polished shoes, he thinks he looks very grand, but he is not
so sure that in that neat and respectable attire he would be
nearly ?o much at his ease as in his own rags and tatters.

WHEN I read Kant I found myself obliged to abandon
the materialism in which in my youlSn I had exulted and
the physiological determinism that went with it, I did
not then know the objections that have riddled Kant’s
system and I found an emotional satisfaction in his
philosophy. It excited me to contemplate that unknow-
able ‘thing in itself’ and I was content with a world that
man had constructed from appearances. It gave me a
peculiar sense of liberation. T jibbed at his maxim that
you should so act that your action may be a universal
rule. I was too much convinced of the diversity of human
nature to believe that this was reasonable. I thought that
what was right for one person might very well be wrong
for another. For my part I chiefly wanted to be let alone,
but I had discovered that not many wanted that, and if
I let them alone they thought me unkind, indifferent and
selfish. But one cannot study the idealistic philosophers
long without coming into touch with solipsism. Idealism
is alw-ays trembling on the brink of it* The philosophers
shy away from it like startled faw,ns, but their aiguments
continue to lead them back to it and so far as I can judge
they escape it only because they will not pursue them to
tlie end. It is a theory that can hardly to allure the

J7^

wtitet of fiction. The claims it makes ate his common
pcactice. It has a completeness and an elegance that
make it infinitely attractive. Since I cannot suppose that
everyone who reads this book will know all about the
various philosophical systems, the instructed reader will
perhaps forgive me if I state briefly what solipsism is.
The solipsist believes only in himself and his experience.
He creates the world as the theatre of his activity, and
the world he creates consists of himself and his thoughts
and feelings; and beyond that nothing has being. Every
thing kiiowable, every fact of experience, is an idea in his
mind, and without his mind does not exist. There is
no possibility *and no necessity for him to postulate
an)rthing outside himself. For him dream and reality are
one. Life is a dream in which he creates the objects that
come before .um, a coherent and consistent dream, and
when he ceases to dream, the world, with its beauty, its
pain and sorrow and unimaginable variety, ceases to be.
It is a perfect thfiory; it has but one defect; it is
unbelievable.

When I cherished the ambition of writing a book on
these matters, thinking I must start at the beginning, I
studied epistemology. 1 found none of the theories tlut I
examined very convincing. It seemed to me that the plain
man (that object of the philosopher’s contempt, except
when it happens that liis views agree with the philoso-
pher’s, in which case quite a lot of value is attached to
them) incompetent to judge of their value was perhaps
entitled to choose that one which most satisfied his pre-
possessions. If one is unwilling to suspend one’s judge-
ment it appears to me that there is a good deal of
plausibility in the theory which h(*lds that, beyond certain
fundamental data which they call the given, and the
existence of other minds, which they infer, men can be
sure of nothing. All the rest of their knowledge is
fiction, the construction of their minds, that they have
devised for the conve^nience of living. Having to fit
themselves, in the course of evolution, to a constantly
changing environment, they have made a picture from
fragments that^they took here and there because they

^77

suited their purposes. This is the world of phenomena
that they know. Reality is nierely the hypothesis they
have suggested as its occasion. It may be that they might
have taken other fragments and combined them into
another picture. This different world would have been
as coherent and as true as the one we imagine we know
It would be difficult to persuadenn author that there
was not a close interaction between the body and the
mind. The experience of Flalibert when he suffered from
the symptoms of arsenical poisoning while writing of
Emma Bovary’s suicide is but an extreme instance of
what every novelist has undergone. Most writers have
chills and fevers, aches and pains, nausea' at times, when
they are engaged in composition; and contrariwise they
are aware to what morbid states of their body they owe
many of their happiest inventions. Knowing that many
of their deepest emotions, many of the reflections that
seem to come straight from heaven, may be due to want
of exercise or a sluggish liver, thej can hardly fail to
regard their spiritual experiences with a certain irony;
which is all to the good, for thus they can manage and
manipulate them. F^or my part, of the various theories
of the relations between matter and spirit that are offered
by the philosophers for the consideration of the plain man
that wWch still seems to me most satisfactory is Spinoza^s
conception tliat substance thinking and substance ex-
tended are one and the same substance. But of course
to-day it is more convenient to call it energy. Unless I
misunderstand him Bertrand Russell has expressed in his
modern fashion an idea not very dissimilar when he
speaks of a neutral stuff which is the raw material of the
mental and physical w«>rlds. Trying to form for myself
some sort of picture of this, I have seen spirit in the like-
ness of a river that forces its way through the jungle of
matter; but river is jungle and jungle is river, for river
and jungle are one. It does not scem^mpossiblc that the
biologists will in the future succeed in creating life in
their laboratories and then it may be that we shall know
more of these matters.

BUT THE plain man’s interest in philosophy is practicaL
He wants to know what is the value of life, how he should
live and what sense he can ascribe to the universe. When
philosophers stand and refuse to give even tentative
answers to these questions they shirk their responsibili-
ties. Now, the most urgent*problom that confronts the
plain man is the problem of evil.

It is curious to notice that when they speak of evil,
philosophers so often use toothache as their example.
They point out with justice that you cannot feel my
toothache. In their sheltered, easy lives it looks as though
this were the only pain that had much afflicted them and
one might Aliiutst conclude that with the improvement
of American dentistry the whole problem could be con-
veniently shelved. I have sometimes thought that it
would be a very good thing if before philosophers were
granted the degrees that will enable them to impart their
wisdom to the young, they had to spend a year in social
service in the slums of a great city or earn their living by
manual labour. If they had ever seen a child die of
meningitis they would face some of the problems that
concern them with other eyes.

If the subject were not of such pressing moment it
would be difficult to read the chapter on evil in Appear-
ance and Reality without ironic amusement. It is
appallingly gentlemanlike. It leaves you with the im-
pression that it is really rather bad form to attach any
great importance to evil, and though its existence must be
admitted it is unreasonable to makf a fuss about it. In any
case it is much exaggerated and it is evident that there is a
lot of good in it. Bradley held that there was no pain on
the whole. The Absolute is the richer for every discord
and for all diversi^ which it embraces. Just as in a
machine, he tells us, the resistance and pressure of the
parts subserve an end beyond any of them, so at a much
higher level it may be with the Absolute; and if this is
possible it is indubitably real. Evil and error subserve a

^79

wider scheme and in this are realized. They play a part in
a higher good and in this settee unknowingly are good.
Evil in short is a deception of our senses and nothing
more.*

I have tried to find out what philosophers of other
schools had to say on this question. This is not vczy
much. It may be that there is not very much to be said
about it, and philosophers quite naturdly attach import-
ance to subjects upon^which^they can discourse at length.
And in the little they have said I can find less to satisfy
me. It may be that the evils we endure educate us and
so make us better; but observation does not allow us to
think that this is a universal rule. It may “be that courage
and sympathy are excellent and that they could not come
into existence without danger and suffering. It is hard
to see how the Victoria Cross that rewards the soldier
who has risked his life to save a blinded man is going
to solace him for the loss of his sight. To give alms
shows cliarity, and charity is a virtue, but docs that good
compensate for the evil of the cripple whose poverty has
called it foith? Evils arc there, omnipresent; pain and
disease, the death of those we love, poverty, crime, sin,
frustrated hope: the list is interminable. What explana-
tions have the philosophers to offer.^ Some say that evil
is logically necessary so that we may know good; some
say that by the nature of the world there is an opposition
between good and evil and that each is metaphysically
necessary to the other. What explanations have the
theologians to offer? Some say that God has placed evils
here for our training; some say that he has sent them
upon men to punish them for their sins. But 1 have seen
a child die of meningitis. I have only found one explana-
tion that appealed equally to my sensibility and to my
imagination. This is the doctrine of the trans<nigration
of souls. As everyone knows, ii assumes thatjlife docs
not begin at birth or end at death, but is a link in an
indefinite scries of lives each one of which is determined
by the acts done in previous existences. Good deeds
may exalt a man to the heights of heaven and evil deeds
degrade him to the depths of hell. All lives come to an

ito

end, even the life of the gods, and happiness is to be
sought in release from the round of births and repose
in* the changeless state called Nirvana. It would be less
difficult to bear the evils of one's own life if one could
think that they were but the necessary outcome of one’s
errors in a previous existence, and the effort to do better
would be less difficult too when there was the hope that in
another existence a ^eater happiness would reward one.
But if one feels one’s own irv a more forcible way
than those of others (I cannot feel your toothache, as the
philosophers say) it is the woes of others that arouse one’s
indignation. It is possible to achieve resignation in regard
to one’s own, but only philosophers obsessed with the
perfection of the Absolute can look upon those of others,
which seem so often unmerited, with an equal mind. If
Karma wer" csnc one could look upon them with pity,
but with fortitude. Revulsion would be out of place and
life would be robbed of the meaninglessness of pain which
is pessimism’s unanswered argument. I can only regret
that I find the doctrine as impossible to believe as the
solipsism of wlxich 1 spoke just now.

69.

Birr I have not done with evil yet. The problem presses
when you come to consider whether God exists, and if he
does, what nature must be ascribed to him. The time
came when, like everybody else, I read the engaging
works of the physicists, I was seized with awe at the
contemplation of che immense distances that separated
the stars and the vast stretches of time that light traversed
in order to come from them to us. I was staggered by
the unimaginable extent of the netulac. If I understood
aright what I read, I must suppose that at the beginning
the two forces of cosmical attraction and repulsion
balanced so that the universe remained for untold ages in
a state of perfect equilibrium. Then at some moment this
was disturbed and the ufiiversc, toppling off its balance,
gave rise to the universe the astronomers tell us of and
die little earth we know. But what caused the original act

iti

of creatiott and what upset the balance of equilibiium?
I seemed inevitably drawn to4Che conception of a creator,
and what could create this vast, this stupendous universe
but a being all-powerful? But the evil of the world then
forces on us the conclusion that this being cannot be all-
powerful and all-good. A God who is all-powerful njay
be justly blamed for the evil of the world and it seems
absurd to consider him with admiration or accord him
worship. But mind ;and h^irt revolt against the concep-
tion of a God who is not all-good. We are forced then to
accept the supposition of a God who is not all-powetfiil:
such a God contains within himself no explanation of
his own existence or of that of the universe he creates.

It is singular when you read the documents on which
the great religions of the world are founded, to note how
much more succeeding ages have read into them than
was there. Their teaching, their example, have created
an ideal greater than themselves. Most of us find it
embarrassing when flowering compliments are paid to us.
It is strange that the devout should think God can be
pleased when they slavishly pay them to him. When I
was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask
me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious
man and he read prayers to the assembled household
every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the
passages m the Book of Osmmon Prayer that praised
God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to
praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman,
he could not believe that God was so ungendemanly as
to like it. At the time it seemed to me a curious eccen-
tricity. I think now that my friend showed very good
sense. ^

Men are passionate, men are weak, men are stupid,
men are pitiful; to bring to beat on them anything so
tremendous as the wrath of God seems strangely inept.
It is not very difficult to forgive other people their sins.
When you put yourself into their shoes it is generally
easy to see what has caused then^ to do things they should
not have done and excuses can be found for thesn. There
is a natiual instinct of anger when some harm is done

zti

one that leads one to revengeful action, and it is hard
in what concerns oneself tq take up an attitude of detach-
ment; but a little reflection enables one to look upon the
situation from the outside and with practice it is no more
diflScult to forgive the harm that is done one than any
other. It is much harder to forgive people the harm one
has done them; that indeed requires a singular power of
mind.

♦ Every artist wishes to J>e beligved in, but he is not
angry with those who will not accept the communication
he offers, God is not so reasonable. He craves so
urgently to be believed in that you might think he
needed your belief in order to reassure himself of his own
existence. He promises rewards to those who believe in
him and threatens with horrible punishment those who
do not. Fo^ lu part I cannot believe in a God who is
angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot
believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot
believe in a God wl^o has neither humour nor common
sense. Plutarch long ago put the matter succinctly. *1
would much rather,’ he writes, ‘have men say of me
that there never was a Plutarch, nor is now, than to say
that Plutarch is a ^nan inconstant, fickle, easily moved
to anger, •revengeful for trifling provocations and vexed
at small things.’

But though men have ascribed to God imperfections
that tlicy would deplore in themselves that does not
prove that God does not exist. It proves only that the
religions that men have accepted are but blind alleys cut
into an impenetrable jungle and none of them leads
to the heart of the great mystery. Arguments have been
adduced to prove the existence of God, and I will ask
the reader to have patience with me while I briefly con-
sider them. One of them assumes that man has on idea
of a perfect being; and since perfection includes existence
a perfect being must exist. Another maintains that every
event has a cause ^d since the universe exists it must
have a cause and this cause is the Creator. A third, the
argument from design, which Kant said was the clearest,
oldest and best suited to human reason, is thus stated by

li)

one ot the characters in Hume*s great dialogues: *the
order and arrangement of natjire, the curious adjustment
of final causes, the plain use and intention of every pkrt
and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an
intelligent cause or Author.* But Kant showed con-
clusively that there was no more to be said in favour of
this argtunent than in that of the other two. In their
place he propounded another. Inf- a few words it is
to the effect that vrjthout^God there is no guarantee
that the sense of duty, wnich presupposes a free and
real self, is not an illusion and therefore that it is morally
necessary to believe in God. This has been generally
thought more creditable to Kant’s amiable nature than
to his subtle intelligence. The argument which to me
seems more persuasive than any of these is one that has
now fallen out of favour. It is known as the proof
e consensu gentium. It asserts that all men from the remotest
origins have had some sort of belief in God and it is
hard to think that a belief that haji grown up witli the
human race, a belief that has been accepted by the wisest
men, the sages of the East, the philosophers of Greece,
the great Scholastics, should not have a foundation in
fact. It has seemed to many instinctive and it may be (one
can only say, it may be, for it is fat from certain) that an
instinct docs not exist unless there is a possibility of its
being satisfied. Experience has shown that the prevalence
of a bcUef, no matter for how long it has been held, is rio
guarantee of its truth. It appears, then, that none of the
arguments for the existence of Go<l is valid. But of course
you do not disprove his existence because you cannot
prove it. Awe remains, man’s sense of helplessness, and
his desire to attain harmony between himself and the
universe at large. Inesc, rather than the yrorship of
nature or of ancestors, magic or morality, arc the sources
of religion. There is no reason to believe that what you
desire exists, but it is a hard saying that you haVe no right
to believe what you cannot prove; tltere is no teason why
you should not believe so long as you arc aware that your
belief lacks proof. I suppose that if your nature is such
that you want comfort in your trials and a love that

lf4

sustains and encourages you, you will neither ask for
proofs nor Iwve need of thjsm. Your intuition suifices.

Mysticism is beyond proof and indeed demands no
more than an indwelling conviction. It is independent
of the creeds, for it finds sustenance in all of them, and
it is so personal that it satisfies every idiosyncrasy. It is
the feeling that the world we live in is but part of a
spiritual universe and from this gains its significance; it
is the sense of a present God who supports and comforts
us. The mystics have narrated their experience so often,
and m terms so similar, that I do not see how one can
deny its reality. Indeed, I have mjrself had on one occa-
sion an experience that I could only describe in the words
the mystics have used to describe their ecstasy. I was
sitting in one of the deserted mosques near Cairo when
suddenly T myself rapt as Ignatius of Loyola was
rapt when he sat by the river at Manresa. I had an over-
whelming sense of the power and import of the universe,
and an intimate, a ^^hattering sense of communion with
it. I could almost bring myself to say that I felt the
presence of God. It is doubtless a common enough
sensation and the mystics have been careful to ascribe
value to it only if its influence was clearly seen in its
results, i have a notion that it can be occasioned by
other causes than the religious. The saints themselves
have been willing to admit that the artists may have it,
and love, as we know, can produce a state so like it
that the mystics have found themselves drawn to use
the phrases of lovers to express the beatific vision. I do
not know that it is more mysterious than that condition,
which the psychologists have not yet explained, when
you have a strong feeling that you have at some past
time been through an expericnce*that you are in the act
of undergoing. The ecstasy of the mystic is real enough,
but it is valid only for himself. Mystic and sceptic
agree in this, that at the end of all our intellectual efforts
there remains a gre A mystery.

Faced with this, «awed by the greatness of the
universe and malcontent with what the philosophers told
me, and what the saints, I have sometimes gone back.

Tbs svminio us. N

beyond Mohammed, Jesus and Buddha, beyond the gods
of Greece, Jehovah and Bad, to the Brahma of the
Upanisads. That spirit, if spirit it may^ be called, self-
created and independent of all other existence, though
all that exists, exists in it, the sole source of life in all that
lives, has at least a grandeur that satisfies the imagination.
But I have been busy with words too long not to be
suspicious of them, and when I loolc at those I have just
written, I cannot but see tha<- their meaning is tenuous.
In religion above all things the only thing of use is an
objective truth. The only God that is of use is a being
who is personal, supreme and good, and whose existence
is as certain as that two and two make -four. I cannot
penetrate the mystery. I remain an agnostic, and the
practical outcome of agnosticism is that you act as though
God did not exist,

70

BELIEF IN God is not essential to belief in immor-
tality, but it is dilltcult to dissociate one from the other.
Even in that shadowy form of survival which looks for-
ward to the dissolution of human consciousness, once
divorced/rom the body, into the general consciousness,
it is only possible to refuse the name of God to this
general consciousness if you deny that it has either efficacy
or value. And practically, as wc know, the two ncuions
have been so inseparably connected that a life after death
has always been looked upon as the most powerful
instrument to God’s hand in his dealings with the human
race. It has offered a merciful God the happiness of
rewarding the good and a revengeful one the satisfaction
of punisiung the wicked. The arguments for immortality
are simple enough, but, if not meaningless, they have no
great force unless the premiss of God’s existence is
accepted first. I will nevertheless enumerate them. One
is based on the incompleteness of life: wc have a craving
to fulfil ourselves, but the forc^ of events, and our own
limitations, leave us with a sense of frustration and this a
future life will counterbalance. So Goethe, though he

did so much, felt that there was still mote for him to do.
AJdn to this is the argument from desire: if we can
conceive immoltality and if we desire it, does not that
indicate that it exists? Our immortal longings can be
understood only by the possibility of their satisfaction.
Another argument insists upon the indignation, the
anguish and perplexity that beset men when they consider
the injustice and the inequality that reign in tWs world.
The wicked flourish like 4hc green bay-tree. Justice
demands another life in which the guilty may be punished
and the innocent rewarded. Evil can be condoned only
if in the beyond it is compensated by good and God him-
self needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man.
Then there is the ideaUstic argument: consciousness can-
not be extinguished by deadi; for the annihilation of
consciousness, is inconceivable, since only consciousness
can conceive the annihilation of consciousness; it goes on
to assert that values exist only for mind and point to a
supreme mind in which they are completely realixed. If
God is love, men arc values to him, and it cannot be
believed that what is bf value to God can be allowed to
perish. But at this point a certain hesitation has betrayed
itself. Common experience, especially the common
experience of philosophers, shows that a great many men
are no great shakes. Immortality is too stupendous a
tiotion to be entertained in connection with common
mortals. They are too insignificant to deserve eternal
punishment or to merit eternal bUss. So philosophers
have been found to suggest that such as have the possi-
bility of spiritual fulfilment will enjoy a limited survival
till they have had the opportunity of reaching the per-
fection of which they are capably and will then suffer a
welcome extinction, while those who have no such
possibility will be forthwith mercifully annihilated. But
when one comes to enquire into the qualities which in
this case will admit the chosen few into the blessings of
this limited survi'i^ one makes the disconcerting dis-
covery that they ate fliose that few but philosophers
possess. One cannot but wonder, however, in what
manner the philosophers will pass their time when their

virtue has received its due reward, for the questions
that occupied them during their sojourn on earth will
presumably have received their adequate replies. One
can only suppose that they will take piano lessons from
Beethoven or learn to paint in water colour under the
guidance of Michelangelo. Unless these two great men
nave much changed they will find th^ irascible masters.

A very good test of the force of arguments on which
you accept a belief is 4o ask •yourself whether for reasons
of equal weight you would embark on a practical opera-
tion of any importance. Would you for example buy a
house on hearsay without having the tide examined by
a lawyer and the drains tested by a surveyor? The argu-
ments for immortality, weak when you take them one
by one, are no more cogent when you take them to-
gether. They are alluring, like a house-agent’s adver-
tisement in the daily paper, but to me at least no more
convincing. For my part I cannot see how consciousness
can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed
and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body
and my mind to think that any survival of my conscious-
ness apart from my body would be in iyiy sense the
survival of myself. Even if one could persuade oneself
that there was any truth in the suggesdon that the human
consciousness survives in some general consciousness,
there would be small comfort in it, and to be satisfied
with the nodon that one survives in such spiritual force
as one has produced is merely to cheat oneself with idle
words. The only survival that has any value is the
complete survival of the individual.

IF THEN one puts aside the existence of God and the
possibility of survival as too doubtful to have any effect
on one’s behaviour, one has to make up one's m^ what
is the meaning and use of life. If dealh ends all, if I have
neither to hope for good to com j nor to fear evil, I must
ask myself what I am here for and how in these circum-
stances I must conduct myself. Now the answer to one

/II

of these questions is plain, but it is so unpalatable that
nuMt men will not face it. There is no reason for life
and life has no*meaning. We are here, inhabitants for a
little while of a small planet, revolving round a minor
star which in its turn is a member of one of unnumbered
^axies. It may be that this planet alone can support
life, or it may be that in other parts of the universe other
planets have had tne possibility of forming a suitable
environment to that substance from which, we suppose,
along the vast course of time the men we are have been
gradually created. And if the astronomer tells us truth
this planet will eventually reach a condition when living
things can no longer exist upon it and at long last the
universe will attain that final stage of equilibrium when
nothing more can happen. iEons and a»ns before this
man will havt disappeared. Is it possible to suppose that
it will matter then that he ever existed? He will have been
a chapter in J:he history of the universe as pointless as
the chapter in whish is written the life stories of the
strange monsters that inhabited the primaeval earth.

I must ask myself then what difference all this makes
to me and how I am to deal with these circumstances if
I want to make the best use of my life and to get the
utmost that I can out of it. Here it is not I that speak, it
is the craving within me, which is in every man, to
persevere in my own being; it is the egoism that we all
inherit from that remote energy which in the unplumbed
past first set the ball rolling; it is the need of self-assertion
which is in every living thing and which keeps it alive.
It is the very essence of man. Its satisfaction is the
self-satisfaction which Spinoaa has told us is the highest
thing for which we can hope, ‘foj no one endeavours to
preserve his being for the sake of any end.’ We may
suppose that consciousness was kindled in man as an
instrument to enable him to deal with his environment
and that for long ages it reached no higher development
than was needed to deal with the vitid problems of his
practice. But it seems iif course of time to have outgrown
his immediate needs, and with the rise of imagination
man widened his environment to include the unseen. We

know with what answers he satisfied the questions that
he put to himself then. The energy that flamed within
him was so intense that he could admit ho doubt of his
significance; his egoism was so all-embracing that he
could not conceive the possibility of his extinction. To
many these answers are satisfactory stilL They give
meaning to life and comfort to hum^ vanity.

Most people think little. They accept their presence
in the world; blind skves of the striving which is their
mainspring they are driven this way and that to satisfy
their natural impulses, and when it dwindles they go out
like the light of a candle. Their lives are purely instinc-
tive. It may be that theirs is the greater ^Visdom. But if
your consciousness has so far developed that you find
certain questions pressing upon you and you think the
old answers wrong, what are you going to do? What
answers will you give? To at least one of these questions
two of the wisest men who ever lived have given their
own answers. When you come to look at them they
seem to mean pretty much the same thing and I am not
so sure that that is very much. Aristotle has said that the
end of human activity is right action, and Goethe that the
secret of life is living. I suppose that Goctlhe means that
man makes the most of his life when he arrives at self-
realization; he had small respect for a life governed
by passing whims and uncontrolled instincts. Bujt
the difficulty of self-realization, that bringing to the
highest perfection every faculty of whicn you are pos-
sessed, so that you get from life all the pleasure, beauty,
emotion and interest you can wring from it, is that
the claims of other people constantly limit your activity;
and moralists, taken by the reasonableness of the theory,
but frightened of its consequences, have spilt much
ink to prove that in sacrifice and selflessness a man
most completely realizes himself. That is certainly not
what Goethe meant and it does not seem to be true. That
there is a singular delight in self-sacrifice few would deny,
and in so far as it offers a new field for activity and the
opportunity to develop a new side of the self, it lias value
in self-realization; but if you aim at self-realization only

1^0

in so fat as it inteiferes with no one else’s attempts at the
sime thing you will no^ get very far. Such an aim
demands a gocad deal of ruthlessness and an absorption
in oneself which is offensive to others and thus often
stultifies itself. As we well know many of those who
c|me in contact with Goethe were outraged by his frigid
egotism.

72 -

IT MAY seem arrogant that I should not have been con-
tent to walk in the steps of men much wiser than myself.
But much as we resemble one another we are none of us
exactly alike (our finger-prints are there to show it), and
I have seen no reason why I should not, so far as I could,
choose o vii course. I have sought to make a pattern
of my life. This, I suppose, might be described as self-
realization tempered by a lively sense of irony; making the
best of a bad* job. Jjut a question presents itself which I
shirked when, at the beginning of my book, I dealt with
this subject; and now that I can avoid it no longer I cannot
but draw back. I am conscious that here and there I have
taken free-will lor granted; I have spoken as though I
had powCr to mould my intentions and direct my actions
as the whim took me. In other places I have spoken as
though 1 accepted determinism. Such shilly-shallying
would have been deplorable had I been writing a philo-
sophical work. I make no such pretension. But how
can I, an amateur, be expected to settle a question which
the philosophers have not yet ceased to argue?

It might seem only sensible to leave the matter alone,
but it happens to be one in wliich the writer of fiction
is peculiarly concerned. For as a*writer he finds himself
compelled by his readers to rigid determination. I
pointed out earlier in these pages how unwilling an
audience is to accept impulse on the stage. Now an
impulse is merely ifti urge to action of whose motive the
agent is not consciousf it is analogous to an intuition,
which is a judgement you make without being aware of
its grounds. But though an impulse has its motive, an

audience, because it is not obvious, will not accept it.
The spectators of a play and the readers of a book insist
on knowing the reasons of action and' they will not
admit its probability unless the reasons are cogent. Each
person must behave in character; that means that he must
do what from their knowledge of him thc^ expect him
to do. Cunning must be exercised in order to persuade
them to accept the coincidences and'accidents which in
real life they swallowAwithovt a second thought. They
are determinists to a man and tlie writer who trifles with
their obstinate prejudice is lost.

But when I look back upon my own life I cannot but
notice how much that vitally affected me has been due to
circumstances that it is hard not to regard as pure chance.
Determinism tells us that choice follows the line of least
resistance or the strongest motive. I am not conscious
that I have always followed the line of least resistance,
and if I have followed the strongest motive that motive
has been an idea of myself that 1 hav^' gradually evolved.
The metaphor of chess, though frayed and shop-worn,
is here wonderfully apposite. The pieces were provided
and I had to accept the mode of action that was charac-
teristic of each one; I had to accept the 'moves of the
persons I played with; but it has seemed to me that I had
the power to make on my side, in accordance perhaps
with my likes and dislikes and the ideal that I set before
me, moves that I freely willed. It has seemed to me that
I have now and then been able to put forth an effort
that was not wholly determined. If it was an illusion it
was an illusion that had its own efficacy. The moves I
made, I know now, were often mistaken, but in one way
and another they have tended to the end in view. I wish
that I had not committed a great many errors, but I do
not deplore them nor would I now have them uiidone.

I do not think it unreasonable to hold th^ opinion
that everything in the universe combines to catise every
one of out actions, and this naturally includm all our
opinions and desires; but whethibr an action, once per-
formed, was inevitable from all eternity can only be
decided when you have made up your mind whether or

I9f

no there arc events, the events that Dr. Broad calls causal
pipgenitors, which are not completely determined. Hume
long ago showed that there was no intrinsic connection
between cause and eflFect which could be perceived by the
mmd; and of late the Principle of Indeterminacy, by
bringing to vjew certain events to which apparently no
causes can be assigned, has cast a doubt on the universal
efficacy of those laws upon which science has hitherto been
based. It looks as if chance must cnce more be reckoned
with. But if we are not certainly bound by the law of
cause and effect, then perhaps it is not an illusion that our
wills are free. The bishops and the deans have snatched
at this new notion as though it were the deviPs tail by
which they hoped to drag the old devil himself back into
existence. There has been great rejoicing, if not in the
courts of heaven, at all events in the palaces of the
episcopacy. Perhaps the Te Dcum has been sung too
soon. It is well to remember that the two most eminent
scientists of our day regard Heisenberg's principle with
scepticism. Planck has stated his belief that further
research will sweep away the anomaly, and Einstein has
described the philosoplucal ideas that have been based
upon it as ^literature’; I am afraid that this is only his
avil way of calling them nonsense. The physicists them-
selves tell us that physics is making such rapid progress
that it is only possible to keep abreast of it by a close
study of the periodical literature. It is surely rash to
found a theory on principles suggested by a science
that is so unstable. Schrodinger himself has stated that
a final and comprehensive judgement on the matter is at
present impossible. The plain man is justified in sitting
on the fence, but perhaps he is prudent to keep his legs
dangUng on the side of determinism.

THE LIFE force Is vigorous. The delight that accom-
panies it counterbalance all the pains aixl hardships that
confront men. It makes life worth living, for it works
from within and lights with its own bright flame each

one^s circumstances so that, however intolerable, they yet
seem tolerable to him. Muc]^ pessimism is caused by
ascribing to others the feelings you would feel if you were
in their place. It is this (among much else) that makes
novels so false. The novelist constructs a public world
out of his own private world and gives to the characters
of his fancy a sensitiveness, a power of reflection and an
emotional capacity, which are peculiar to himself. Most
people have little imagination and they do not suffer from
circumstances that to the imaginative would be unbear-
able. The lack of privacy, to take an instance, in which
the very poor live seems frightful to us who value it; but
it does not seem so to the very poor. They hate to be
alone; it gives them a sense of security to live in company.
No one who has dwelt among them can fail to have
noticed how little they envy the well-to-do. The fact is
that they do not want many of the things that to others of
us appear essential. It is fortunate for the well-to-do.
For he is blind who will not see th^t in tht lives of the
proletariat in the great cities all is misery and confusion.
It is hard to reconcile oneself to the fact that men should
have no work to do, that work should be so dreary, that
they should live, they, their wives and thqir cliildren, on
the edge of starvation, and in the end have nothing to
look forward to but destitution. If only revolution can
remedy this, then let revolution come and come quickly/
When we see the cruelty with which men even now treat
one another in countries that we have been in the habit of
calling civilized, it would be rash to say that they are any
better than they were, but for all that it docs not seem
fatuous to think that the world is on the whole a better
place to live in than it was in the past that history sets
before us, and that the lot of the great majority, bad as it
is, is less dreadful than it was then; and one may reason-
ably hope that with the increase of knowledge, with the
discarding of many cruel superstitions and outworn con-
ventions, with a livelier sense of lovkig-kindness, many
of the evils from which men suffchr will be removed. But
many evils must continue to exist. We are the playthings
of nature. Earthquakes will continue to wreak havoc,

^94

droughts to ruin crops and unforeseen floods to destroy
th^ prudent constructions ^of men. Human folly, alas,
will continue to devastate the nations with war. Men will
continue to be born who are not fitted for life and life
will be a burden to them. So long as some arc strong and
socne are wea^ the weak will be driven to the wall. So
long as men are cursed with the sense of possession, and
that I presume is a^ long as they exist, they will wrest
what they can from those wjio are«powerless to hold it.
So long as they have the instinct of self-assertion, they
will exercise it at the expense of others’ happiness. In
short, so long as man is man he must be prepared to face
all the woes that he can bear.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked
upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To
ignore it is rhildish; to bewail it senseless. Spinoza
called pity womanish; the epithet has a harsh sound on
the lips of that tender and austere spirit. I suppose he
thought that ft was hut waste of emotion to feel strongly
about what you could not alter.

I am not a pessimist. Indeed, it would be non-
sensical of me to be so, for I have been one of the lucky
ones. I have often wondered at my good fortune. I am
well aware that many who were more deserving than I
have not had the happy fate that has befallen me. An
2t,cddent here, an accident there, might have changed
everything and frustrated me as so many with talents
equal to, or greater than, mine, ith equal opportunities,
have been frustrated. Should any of them chance to read
these pages, I would ask them to believe that I do not
arrogantly ascribe to my merits what has come to me, but
to some concatenation of unlikely circumstances for
which I can offer no explanation, ^ith all my limitations,
physical and mental, I have been glad to live. I would
not live my life over again. There would be no point in
that. Nor would I care to pass again through the anguish
I have suffered. It*is one of the faults of my nature that
I have suffered more freJm the pains, than I have enjoyed
the pleasures, of my life. But without my physical imper-
fections, with a stronger body and a better brain, I would

not mind entering upon the world afresh. The years that
now stretch immediately in front of us look as if they
would be interesting, llie young entef upon Ufe now
with advantages that were denied to the young of my
generation. They are hampered by fewer conventions
and they have learnt how great is the v^ue of youfh.
The world of my twenties was a middle-aged world and
youth was something to be got thitough as quickly as
possible so that maturity might be reached. The young
things of the present day, at least in that middle-class to
whiw I belong, seem to me better prepared. They
are taught now many things that are useful to them,
whereas we had to pick them up as best we could. The
relation between tibe sexes is mote normal. Young
women have learnt now to be the companions of young
men. One of the difficulties that my generation had to
face, the generation that saw the emancipation of women,
was this: women had ceased to be the housekeepers and
mothers of an earlier age, who led a life apart from men,
with their own interests and particular concerns, and
were trying to participate in men’s affairs without the
capacity to do so; they demanded the consideration that
had been their due when they were content to look
upon themselves as men’s inferiors and withal insisted
on their right, their new-won right, to join in all the
mascuJlne activities in which they knew only enough
to make a nuisance of themselves. They were no longer
housewives and had not yet learnt to be good fellows.
There is no more pleasant spectacle for an elderly gentle-
man than that of the young girl of the present day, so
competent and so self-assured, who can run an office and
play a hard game of tennis, who is intelligently concerned
with public affairs and 'can appreciate the arts, and pre-
pared to stand on her own feet, faces life w^th cool,
shrewd and tolerant eyes.

Far be it from me to don the prophet’s maqtle, but I
think it is clear that these young folk'who are now taking
the stage must look forward to* economic changes that
wiU transform civilisation. They will not know the easy,
sheltered life which makes many who were at their prime

Iff

bcfoce the wai look upon those years as did the survivors
of fhe French Revolution ^hen they looked l»ck on the
/'Vnden Regime,'* They will not know the doucettr it vivre.
We live now on the eve of great revolutions. I cannot
doubt that the proletariat, increasingly conscious of its
rights, will evjpntually seiae power in one country after
the other, and I never cease to marvel that the governing
classes of to-day, rdther than continue a vain struggle
against these overwhelming forofs, do not use every
effort to train the masses for their future tasks so that
when they ate dispossessed their fate may be less cruel
than that which befell them in Russia. Years ago Disraeli
told them what to do. For my part I must candidly say
that I hope the present state of things will last my time.
But we live in an era of rapid change and I may yet see
the countries jf the west given over to the rule of com-
munism. A Russian exile of my acquaintance told me
that when he lost his estates and his wealth, he was over-
come with despair)! but at the end of a fortnight he
regained his serenity and never since gave a thought to
• what he had been deprived of. I do not think I have such
an attachment to my various possessions as to regret their
loss for long. If such a condition of things came to pass
in my world I should make an attempt to adapt myself
and then, if I found life intolerable, I think I should not
lack the courage to quit a stage on which I could no
longer play my part to my own satisfaction. I wonder
why so many people turn with horror from the thought
of suicide. • To speak of it as cowardly is nonsense. I can
only approve the man who makes an end of himself of
his own will when life has nothing to offer him but pain
and misfortune. Did not Pliny say that the power of
dying when you please is the tf^st thing that God has
given to man amid all the sufferings of life? Putting aside
those who regard suicide as sinful because it breaks a
divine law, I think the reason of the indignation which
it seems to arous^ in so many is that the suicide flouts
the life-force, and by*setting at no^ht the strongest
instinct of human beings casts a terrifying doubt on its
power to preserve them.

*97

With this book I shall have completed In sufficient
outline the pattern I set myself to make. If I live I shall
write other books, for my amusement and I hope for the
amusement of my readers, but I do not think they will
add anything essential to my design. The house is built.
There will be additions, a terrace from wjiich one has a
pretty view, or an arbour in which to meditate in the heat
of summer; but should death prevent me from producing
them, the house, though the housebreakers may set to
work on it the day after I am buried in an obituary notice,
will have been built.

I look forward to old age without dismay. When
Lawrence of Arabia was killed I read in' an article con-
tributed by a friend that it was his habit to ride his
motor-bicycle at an excessive speed with the notion that
an accident would end his life while he was still in full
possession of his powers and so spare him the indignity
of old age. If this is true it was a great weakness in that
strange and somewhat theatrical character. It showed
want of sense. For the complete life, the perfect pattern,
includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The
beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good,
but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains
and turned on the light in order to shut out the tran-
quillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which,
though different, are not less than the pleasures of youtlj.
The philosophers have always told us that we are the
slaves of our passions, and is it so small a thing to be
liberated from their sway? The fool’s old age will be
foolish, but so was his youth. The young man turns
away from it with horror because he thinks that when
he reaches it, he will still yearn for the things that give
variety and gusto to his youth. He is mistaken. It is
true that the old man will no longer be able to climb
an Alp or tumble a pretty girl on a bed; it is true that
he can no longer arouse the concupiscence of Others. It
is something to be free from the pangS of unrequited love
and the torment of jealousy, It4s something that envy,
which so often poisons youth, should be assuaged by the
extinction of desire. But these are negative compensa-

19^

tions; old age has positive compensations also. Para-
dojical as it may sound it Jias more time. When I was
young I was aftiazed at Plutarch’s statement that the
elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I
am ama 2 cd no longer. Old age is ready to undertake
tasks that yoijth slurked because they would take too
long. In old age the taste improves and it is possible to
enjoy art and literatftre without the personal bias that in
youth warps the judgement.^ It has*the satisfaction of its
own fulfilment. It is liberated from the trammels of
human egoism; free at last, the soul delights in the passing
moment, but does not bid it stay. It has completed the
pattern. Goethe asked for survival after death so that
he might realize those sides of himself which he felt that
in his life he had not had time to develop. But did he not
say that ht wi u would accomplish anytliing must learn
to limit himSclf? When you read his life you cannot but
be struck by the way in vvliich he wasted time in trivial
pursuits- PerKaps if he had limited himself more carefully
he would have developed everything that properly
belonged to his special individuality and so found no
need of a future life.

74

S^PINOZA SAYS that a free man thinks of notliing less
than of death. It is unnecessary to dwell upon it, but it is
foolish, as so many do, to shrink from all consideration
of it. It is'wcll to make up one’s mind about it. It is
impossible to know till death is there facing one whether
one will fear it. 1 have often tried to imagine what my
feelings would be if a doctor told me I had a fatal disease
and had no more than a little time to live. I have put
them into the mouths of various characters of my inven-
tion, but I am aware that thus I dramatized them and I
cannot tell whether they would be those 1 should actually
feel. I do not thinK I have a very strong instinctive hold
on life. I have had a good many scriou . illnesses, but
have only once known myself to be within measurable
distance of death; then I was so tired that I could not

feat, I only wanted to be done with the straggle. Death
is inevitable and it does not much mattet how one meets
it. 1 do not think one can be blamed if one hopes that
one will not be aware of its imminence and be fortunate
enough to undergo it without pain.

I have always lived so much in the future that now,
though the future is so short, I cannot get out of the
habit and my mind looks forward -with a certain com-
placency to Ac completion within an indefinite number
of years of the pattern that I have tried to make. There
are moments when I have; so palpitating an eagerness for
death that I could fly to it as to the arms of a lover. It
gives me the same passionate thrill as years ago was given
me by life. I am drunk with the thought of it. It seems
to me then to offer me the final and absolute freedom.
Notwithstanding, I am willing enough to go on living
so long as the doctors can keep me in tolerable health;
I enjoy the spectacle of the world and it interests me to
see what is going to liappen. The cansumn’nation of many
lives that have run their course parallel with my own
gives me continual food for reflection and sometimes for
me confirmation of theories that I formed long ago. I
shall be sorry to part from my friends. I cannot be
indifferant to the welfare of some whom I have guided
and protected, but it is well that after depending on me
so long they should enjoy their liberty whithersoever it
leads them. Having held a certain place in the world
for a long time I am content that others soon should
occupy it. After all the point of a pattern is that it should
be completed. When nothing can be added without
spoiling the design the artist leaves it.

But now if anyone should ask me what is the use or
sense of this pattern i should have to answ^, none. It
is merely something I have imposed on the senselessness
of life because I am a novelist. For my own,satisfiiction,
for my amusement and to gratify wlut feeli to me like
an organic need, I have smiped my life lit accordance
with a certain design, with a beginning, a middle and an
end, as from people I have met here and there 1 have
constructed a play, a novel or a short story. We are

200

the product of our natures and our environment. I
have not made the patteri^ I thought best, or even the
pattern I should have liked to make, but merely that
which seemed feasible. There are better patterns than
mine. ♦ I do not believe that I am influenced only by an
illusion natur^ to the man of letters to think that the
best pattern or all is the husbandman^s, who ploughs his
land and reaps his Aop, who enjoys his toil and enjoys
his leisure, loves, marries,^ begets children and ^es.
When I have observed the peasantry in those favoured
lands in which the earth produces her plenty without
excessive labour, where the pleasures and pains of the
individual are those incidental to the human race, it has
seemed to me that there the perfect life was perfectly
realized. There life, like a good story, pursues its way
from beginxUii^^ lo end in a firm and unbroken line.

7/

THE EGOISM of man makes him unwilling to accept the
meaninglessness of life and when he has unhappily found
himself no longer able to believe in a higher power whose
ends he could flatter himself that he subserved he has
sought t<t give it significance by constructing certain
values beyond those that seem to further his immediate
welfare. The wisdom of the ages has chosen three of
these as most worthy. To aim at them for their own sake
has seemed to give life some kind of sense. Though it
can hardly Ac dcjubfcd that they too have a biologic
utility, they have superficially an appearance of dis-
interestedness which gives man the illusion that through
them he escapes from human bondage. Their nobiUty
strengthens his wavering sense of His spiritual significance
and, whatever the result, the pursuit of them appears to
justify his efforts. Oases in the vast desert of existence,
since he knows no other end to his journey, man per-
suades himself that«they at all events are worth reaching
and that there he will find rest and the mswer to his
question. These three values are Truth, Beauty and
Goodness.

20i

Tmt 'tniaim Vv. O

1 have a notion that Truth finds a place in this list
for thetotical reasons. Man invests it with ethical que-
ries, such as courage, honour and independence of spirit,
which indeed are often shown by his insistence on truth,
but which in effect have nothing whatever to do with it.
Finding in it so great an occasion for ,his own self-
assertion he will be indifferent to any sacrifice that it
entails. But then his interest is in hilnself and not in the
truth. If truth is a value it Js because it is true and not
because it is brave to speak it. But truth is a character of
judgements and so one would suppose that its value lay
in the judgements it charactedaes rather than in itself. A
bridge that joined two great cities would be more
important than a bridge that led from one barren field to
another. And if truth is one of the ultimate values, it
seems strange that no one seems quite to know what it is.
Philosophers sdll quarrel about its meaning and the
upholders of rival doctrines say many sarcastic things of
one another. In these circumstances the plain man must
leave them to it and content himself with the plain man’s
truth. This is a very modest affair and merely asserts
something about particular existents. It is a bare state-
ment of the facts. If this is a value one must admit that
none is more neglected. The books on ethics give long
lists of occasions on which it may be legitimately with-
held; their authors might have saved themselves the
trouble. The wisdom of the ages has long since decided
that toutes viritls m sont pas bonnes d dire. Alan has always
sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He
lives not by truth but by make-believe, and his idealism,
it has sometimes seemed to me, is merely his effort to
attach the prestige of truth to the fictions he has invented
to satisfy his self-conceit.

7 ^

BEAUTY STANDS in a better casef. For many years I
thought that it was beauty alone^tkat gave significance to
life and that the only purpose that could be assigned to
the teeming generations tlut succeed one another on the

i02

lace of the earth was to piroduce now and then an artist.
T^e work of art, I decided, was the crowning product of
human activity, and the final justification for all the
misery, the endless toil and the frustrated strivings of
humanity. So that Michelangelo might paint certain
figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, so that
Shakespeare might write certain speeches and Keats his
odes, it seemed to*me worth while that imtold millions
should have lived and suffaced and died. And though I
modified this extravagance later by including the beautiful
life among the works of art that alone gave a meaning to
life, it was still beauty that I valued. All these notions I
have long sincb abandoned.

In the first place I discovered that beauty was a full
stop. When I considered beautiful things I found that
there was notluiig for me to do but to gaze and admire.
The emotion they gave me was exquisite, but I could not
preserve it, nor could I indefinitely repeat it; the most
beautiful things in<he world finished by boring me. 1
noticed that I got a more lasting satisfaction from works
of a more tentative character. Because they had not
achieved complete success they gave more scope for the
activity of my imagination. In the greatest of all works of
art everything had been realized, I could give nothing,
and my restless mind tired of passive contemplation. It
deemed to me that beauty was like tlic summit of a
mountain peak; when you had reached it there was
nothing to do but to come down again. Perfection is a
trifle dull.* It is not the least of life’s ironies that this,
which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

I suppose that we mean by beauty that object,
spiritual or material, more often^aterial, which satisfies
our aesthetic sense. That, however, tells you just about as
much as you would know about water if you were told
that it was wet. I have read a good many books to
discover what the authorities had to say that made the
matter a little plalher. I have known intimately a great
many persons who wer j absorbed in the „rts. I am afraid
that neither from them not from books have I learnt
much that greatly profited me. One of the most curious

things that has forced itself on r^y notice is that there is no
permanence in the judgement of beauty. The muscuiys
are full of objects which the most cultivated taste of a
period considered beautiful, but which seem to us now
worthless; and in my own lifetime I have seen the beauty
evaporate from poems and pictures, exquisifte not so long
ago, like hoar frost before the morning sun. Vain as we
may be we can hardly think our own judgement ultimate;
what we think beautiful wiU doubtless be scorned in
another generation, and what we have despised may be
raised to honour. The only conclusion is that beauty is
relative to the needs of a particular generation, and that
to examine the things we consider beautiflil for qualities
of absolute beauty is futile. If beauty is one of the values
that give life significance it is something that is constantly
changing and thus cannot be analysed, for we can as little
feel the beauty our ancestors felt as we can smell the roses
they smelt.

I have tried to find out from the writers on aesthetics
what it is in human nature that makes it possible for us to
get the emotion of beauty and what exactly this emotion
is. It is usual enough to talk of the aesthetic instinct: the
term seems to give it a place among the mainsprings of
the human being, like hunger and sex, and at the same
time to eodow it with a specific qualify that flatters the
philosophic craving for unity. So aesthetics have beenl
derived from an instinct of expression, an exuberance of
vitality, a mystical sense of the absolute and I know not
what. For my part I should have said it ^as not an
instinct at all, but a state of the body-mind, founded in
part on certain powerful instincts, but combined with
human characteristics, which are the result of the evolu-
tionary process, and with the common circumstanc^^s of
life. That it has a great deal to do with the sexual ins^-inct
seems to be shown by the fact, commonly admitted, that
those who possess an aesthetic sense of unusuall delicacy
diverge sexually from the norm to an Extreme and often
pathological degree. There may Be in the constitution of
the body-mind something that renders certain tones,
certain rhythms and certain colours peculiarly attractive

204

to man, so that there may ^e a physiological reason for the
elements of what we con^der beautiful. But we also find
tlungs beautififl because they remind us of objects, people
or places, that we have loved or to which the passage of
time has lent a sentimental value. We find things beauti-
ful because ^j{e recognize them and contrariwise we find
things beautiful because their novelty surprises us. All
this means that assfleiation, by likeness or contrast, enters
largely into the sesthetic egiotion# It is only association
that can explain the aesthetic value of the ugly. I do not
know that anyone has studied the effect of time on the
creation of beauty. It is not only that we grow to see the
beauty of things as we know tliem better; it is rather that
the delight that succeeding ages take in them somehow
adds to their beauty. That, I suppose, is why certain ,
works whose beauty mow seems manifest should, when
first giv^n i . thr world, have attracted no great attention.

1 have a notion that the odes of Keats are more beautiful
than when Ke wrote them. They are enriched by the
emotion of all who have found solace and strength in
their loveliness. Far then from thinking the lesthetic
emotion a specific, simple affair, I think it is a very com-
plicated one, which is made up of various, often dis-
cordant ‘elemeiits. It is no good for the sesthetidans to
say that you ought not to be moved by a picture or a
jsymphony because it fills you with erotic excitement or
mtlts you to tears by reminding you of some long-for-
gotten scene, or through its associations exalts you to
mystic raj^ure. It docs; and these sides of it are just as
much part and parcel of the aesthetic emotion as the
disinterested satisfaction in balance and composition.

What exactly is one’s reaction to a great work of art?
What does one feel when fof instance one looks at
Titian’s lintombment in the Louvre or listens to the
quintet in the Meistersinger? I know what mine is. It is
an excitement that gives me a sense of exhilaration,
intellectual but suffused with sensuality, a feeling of well-
being in which I seem fo discern a sense of power and of
liberation from human ties; at the same time I feel in
myself a tenderness which is rich with human sympathy;

20J

I feel rested, at peace and yet ^*)ifitually aloof. Indeed on
occasion, looking at certain pictures or statues, listening
to certain music, I have had an emotion *oO strong th/t I
could only describe it in the same words as those the
mystics use to describe the union with God. That is why
I have thought that this sense of comrr^union witl\^a
larger reality is not only the privilege of the religious, but
may be reached by other paths than'‘prayer and fasting.
But I have asked mysejf what^was the use of this emotion.
Of course it is delightful and pleasure in itself is good, but
what is there in it that n\akes it superior to any other
pleasure, so superior that to speak of it as pleasure at all
seems to depreciate it? Was Jeremy Bentham so foolish
after all when he said that one sort of happiness was as
good as another, and if the amount of pleasure was equal
pushpin as good as poetry? The answer the mystics gave
to this question was unequivocal. They said that rapture
was worthless unless it strengthened the character and
rendered man more capable of right %ction.‘ The value of
it lay in works.

It has been my lot to live much among persons of
aesthetic sensibility. I am not speaking now of the
creators: to my mind there is a great difference between
those who create art and those who enjoy It; the creators
produce because of that urge vrithin them that forces
them to exteriorize their personality. It is an accident if
what they produce has beauty; that is seldom their special
aim. Their aim is to disembarrass their souls of the
burdens that oppress them and they use the nRcans, their
pen, their paints or their clay, for which they have by
nature a facility, I am speaking now of those to whom
the contemplation and appreciation of art is the main
business of life. I havd found little to admire in them.
They are vain and sclf-complaccnt. Inapt for the practical
affairs of life, they disdain those who with humility
perform the modest offices to which their destiny has
constrained them. Because they haveccad a great many
book-, or seen a great many pictutts they think themselves
superior to other men. They use art to escape the realities
of life and in their imbecile contempt for common things

zo6

deny value to the essentia| activities of humanity. They
arc no better really than dgig-fiends; worse rather, for the
drug^fiend at alt events does not set himself on a pedestal
from which to look down on his fellow-men. The value
of art, like the value of the Mystic Way, lies in its effects.
If jt can only gjive pleasure, however spiritual that pleasure
may be, it is of no great consequence or at least of no
more consequence ^han a dozen oysters and a pint of
Montrachet. If it is a sol^e, thai: is well enough; the
world is full of inevitable evils and it is good tlmt man
should have some hermitage tp which from time to time
he may withdraw himself; but not to escape them, rather
to gather fresh ‘Strength to face them. For art, if it is to be
reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men
humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value
of art is not beauty, but right action.

If bciut one of the great values of life, then it
seems hard to believe that the aesthetic sense which
enables men tb appi^ciate it should be the privilege only
of a class. It is not possible to maintain that a form of
sensibility that is shared but by the elect can be a necessity
of human life. Yet that is what the aesthetes claim. 1
must confess that in my foolish youth when I considered
that art (fn which I included the beauties of nature, for I
was very much of opinion, as indeed I still am, that their
beauty was constructed by men as definitely as they
constructed pictures or symphonies) was the crown of
human endeavour and the justification of man’s existence,
it gave moiU peculiar satisfaction to think that it could be
appreciated only by the chosen few. But this notion has
long stuck in my gizzard. I cannot believe that beauty is
the appanage of a set and I am inclined to think that
a manifestation of art that has a Aeaning only to persons
who have undergone a peculiar training is as incon-
siderable as the set to wliich it appeals. An art is only
great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The
art of a clique is but a plaything. I do not know why
distinctions arc made l5btween ancient art and modem
art. There is nothing but art. Art is livi''<^. To attempt
to give an object of art life by dwelling on its historic^,

cultutal^ or archaeological a^odations is senseless. It
does not matter whether a sta{ue was hewn by an archaic
Gretfk or a modern Frenchman. Its orilfy importance is
that it should give us here and now the aesthetic thrill and
that this aesthetic thrill should move us to works. If it is
to be anything more than a self-indulgence and# an
occasion for self-complacency, it must strengthen your
character and make it more fitted for right action. And
little as I like the deductioix I cannot but accept it; and
this is that the work of art must be judged by its fruits,
and if these are not good k is valueless. It is an odd fact,
which must be accepted as in the nature of things and for
which I know no explanation, that the artist achieves this
eflFect only when he does not intend it. His sermon is
most efficacious if he has no notion that he is preaching
one. The bee produces wax for hfcr own purposes and is
unaware that man will put it to diverse uses.*

77

IT APPEARS then impossible to say that cither truth or
beauty has intrinsic value. What about^oodness? But
before I speak of goodness I would speak oi love; for
there are philosophers who, thinking that it embraced
every other, have accepted it as the highest of human
values. Platonism and Christianity have combined to
give it a mystical significance. The associations of the
word lend it an emotion that makes it more SSciting than
plain goodness. Goodness in comparison is a trifle dull.
But love has two meanings, love pure and simple, sexual
love, namely; and lovjng-kindness. I do not think that
even Plato distinguished them with exactness. He seems
to me to ascribe the exultation, the sense of power, the
feeling of heightened vitality which accompany sexual
love to that other love which he calls the heavenly love
and which I should prefer to call lovihg-kindncss; and by
doing so infects it with the in(?radicable vice of earthly
love. For love passes. Love dies The great tragedy of
life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

20S

Not the least of the evils of life, and one for which there is
sipall help, is that sopejjae whom you love no longer
lovej you; when La Rochefoucauld discovered that
betwefen two lovers there is one who loves and one who
lets himself be loved he put in an epigram the discord that
njust ever prevent men from achieving in love perfect
happiness. However much people may resent the fact
and however angrily deny it, there can surely be no doubt
that love depends on ceijain secretions of the sexual
glands. In the immense majority these do not continue
indefinitely to be excited by# the same object and with
advancing years they atrophy. People are very hypo-
critical in this*matter and will not face the truth. They so
deceive themselves that they can accept it with com-
placency when their love dwindles into what they,
describe as a solid and enduring affection. As if affection
had anyrhlf^ to do with love! Affection is created by
habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire
of companionship.* It is a comfort rather than an ex-
hilaration. We are creatures of change, change is the
atmosphere we breathe, and is it likely that the strongest
but one of all our instincts should be free from the law?
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor arc
those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing,
continue to love a changed person. Mostly, different
ourselves, we make a desperate, pathetic effort to love in a
different person the person wc once loved. It is only
because the power of love when it seizes us seems so
mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last for
ever. When it subsides we are ashamed, and, duped,
blame ourselves for our weakness, vrhercas we should
accept our change of heart as a natural effect of our
humanity. The experience of Aankind has led them to
regard love with mingled feelings. They have been
suspicious of it. They have as often cursed as praised it.
The soul of man, struggling to be free, has except for
brief moments looked upon the self-surrender that it
claims as a fall from gftice. The happiness it brings may
be the greatest of which man is capable, but it is seldom,
seldom unalloyed. It writes a story that generally has a

20 ^

sad ending. Many have rescued its power and angrily
prayed to be delivered fron^^its burden. They have
hugged their chains, but knowing they wire chains jtiafed
them too. Love is not always blind and there are few
things that cause greater wretchedness than to love with
all your heart someone who you know unworthy />f
love.

But loving-kindness is not coloured with that tran-
sitoriness which is th® irrcn^diable defect of love. It is
true that it is not entirely devoid of the sexual element.
It is like dancing; one dances for the pleasure of the
rhythmic movement, and it is not necessary that one
should wish to go to bed with one’s partner; but it is a
pleasant exercise only if to do so would not be disgusting.

, In loving-kindness the sexual instinct is sublimated, but
it lends the emotion something ®f its own warm and
vitalizing energy. Loving-kindness is the better part of
goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which
this consists and makes it a little les^ difficult to practise
those minor virtues of self-control and self-restraint,
patience, discipline and tolerance, wliich are the passive
and not very exhilarating elements of goodness. Good-
ness is the only value that seems in this world of appear-
ances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Vittue is its
own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so common-
place a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should
have liked to end my book with some startling and
paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my
readers would have recognized with a chuckl#i^s charac-
teristic. It seems I hayc httle more to say than can be read
in any copybook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a
long way round to discover what everyone knew already,

I have little sense cA" reverence. There is a great deal
too much of it in the world. It is claimed for many
objects that do not deserve it. It is often no more than the
conventional homage we pay to things in wliich we arc
not willing to take an active interest. ^The best homage
we can pay to the great figures oftthe past, Dante, Titian,
Shakespeare, Spinoza, is to treat them not with reverence,
but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were

210

OUT contemporaries. Thui we pay them the highest
compliment we can; our Amiliarity acknowledges that
ihcy Site alive far us. iBur when now and then I Jiave
come across real goodness I have found reverence rise
natifrally in my heart. It has not seemed to matter then
th^ its rare possessors were perhaps sometimes a trifle
less intelligent than I should have liked them to be. When
I was a small boy and unhappy I used to dream night
after night that my life at school waj all a dream and that
I should wake to find myself at home again with my
mother. Her death was a wouqd that fifty years have not
entirely healed. I have long ceased to have that dream;
but I have never quite lost the sense that my living
life was a mirage in which I did this and that because
that was how it fell out, but which, even while I was
playing my part in it, I^ould look at from a distance and
know for it was. When I look back on my

life, with its successes and its failures, its endless errors,
its deceptions "and i^s fulfilments, its joys and miseries,
it seems to me strangely lacking in reality. It is shadowy
and unsubstantial. It may be that my heart, having found
rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God
and immortality which my reason would have no truck
with. In default of anything better it has seemed to me
sometimes that I might pretend to myself that the good-
ness 1 have not so seldom after all come across in many
of those I have encountered on my way had reality. It
may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for
life nor ai^ixplanation of it, but an extenuation. In this
indifferent universe, with its inevitable evils that surround
us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve, not as a
challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own
independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the
tragic absurdity of fate. Unlike beauty, it can be perfect
without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does
not wither its delight. But goodness is shown in right
action and who ca^ tell in this meaningless world what
right action is? It is not^action that aims at happiness; it
is a happy chance if happiness results. Plato, as we know,
enjoined upon his wise man to abandon the serene life

111

of contemplation for the tuimoil of practical af&irs and
thereby set the claim of duty^abpve the desire for h|ippi-
nesc; and we have all of us, I suppose, on occasion
adopted a course because we thought it right though we
well knew that it could bring us happiness neithcr^then
nor in the future. What then is right action? Foi> my
own part the best answer I know is that given by Fray
Luis dc Leon. To follow it does not look so difficult that
human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength.
With it I can end my book. The beauty of life, he says,
is nothing but this, that* each should act in conformity
with his nature and his business.

THE END